


Mercy of the Fallen

by TARDIS_stowaway



Category: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-01
Updated: 2011-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-15 06:54:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/158202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TARDIS_stowaway/pseuds/TARDIS_stowaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>If wishes were horses, this spaceship would be even more crowded and smelly.</i> Trying to escape his past, Jack instead comes face to face with it in the form of the Doctor, on the run from his own recent tragedies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Bottomless thanks and cookies go to my fantastic beta reader, wendymr. Her patience is every bit as impressive as her super beta skills. The story's title comes from the Dar Williams song of the same name. You can listen to it via YouTube [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0EurwBDfFw).

  
_Parnialus Station, Earth year 2012_   


Jack Harkness opened the door to the reactor control chamber, sending acrid smoke flooding into the corridor where he stood. He doubled over coughing and nearly turned away. Anyone in there should be dead. Still, someone had been alive in that chamber a few moments ago, working to stabilize the overloading reactor core from this level while Jack had worked on it from the space station’s bridge, which he'd commandeered immediately after the first explosion. Comms were down, so he’d never found out the name of the engineer, but their combined efforts had saved the lives of every man, woman, child, and sentient robot on this outpost. The reactor would now hold long enough for a full evacuation with time to spare, time enough to attempt even this fairly hopeless rescue mission.

Jack stepped into the chamber, a jumble of collapsed equipment hellishly lit by flames and flashing mauve light. He felt the sting of radiation from the damaged reactor. Bodies of the crew slumped here and there like abandoned dolls. Jack could barely see through the smoke, and the ominous creaking from the ceiling suggested that a cave-in might be on hand. It was a nightmare world, not at all what he’d been expecting when he arrived at this station for a little shore leave.

* * * * * * *

 _Starship Rambler Belle, twelve hours earlier_

“There she is. Parnialus Station.” Captain Suriana Pollves gestured grandly at the window. A rather utilitarian-looking space station was just coming into view orbiting over a planet covered with aggressive swirling clouds.

“Your home, right?” asked Jack Harkness. (That wasn't the name he'd given Suriana or anyone else for the past two years, nor was it his birth name, but however much he tried to change, that was still how he thought of himself.)

“That’s what my paperwork says.” She shrugged. “My clan’s there, and I love them even when I want to throw them out the airlock. The food’s less terrifying than some of the places where we dock, since most people there are Meeviopites like me. It's always a treat to visit Parnialus, but the station ain’t home. Ever since I was an itty-bitty thing my feet have been itching for the stars. This station, it’s nice, but it’s dull. The ‘bots bring ore up from Parnial–that’s the planet–we ship it out, that’s about it. It’s a nice place to raise a family, real safe and friendly, but I prefer this ship. Even if she did _lose gravity right in the middle of dinner time._ ” The last phrase was spoken loudly and with an emphatic thump on the instrument panel, as if to make sure the ship heard. The Rambler Belle wasn’t AI, at least Jack didn’t think so, but that didn’t deter Suriana from talking to it. Suriana would probably make friends with a rock if nothing else were available, chatting away in her folksy accent of Galactic Standard that Jack found adorable, if occasionally difficult to interpret.

“Understood. What’s the plan for when we dock?”

“We unload, then you’ve got two nights of leave. I’ll spend tomorrow making deliveries, checking on the goods I’ve already arranged to buy, and looking through the markets for any extra bargains. The next morning you help restock supplies and get the new payload in. I hope you’re up to exploring on your own, ‘cause I have someone else I want to spend those two nights with.”

Jack laughed. “I see how it is. A sweetheart in every port, huh?”

Suriana swatted at his arm. “You rascal! It’s not the same here as at Xolmch. These people are special.”

“People? Figures that it takes more than one to satisfy you when I’m not around,” Jack leered.

Suriana rolled her eyes, which were set just a little too far apart to be human. “Oh, they’ll have me tired out by the end, believe me.”

“Shall we get a head start?” he said, wrapping an arm around her waist and drawing her against him.

“Sure thing–as soon as you’ve finished the inventory of those lamps we picked up on Xolmch like you said you would. Parnialus is a bit too cramped to want much of the big furniture, but the built-in lighting’s lousy so they’ll buy every lamp we have, plus all those Tsoo vases. Tsoo-period ceramics are all the rage with the collectors around here. Pre-spaceflight Raxacorricofallapatorian stuff would've sold even better, but just try getting any of that in this quadrant without paying with more arms and legs than I happen to possess….”

Jack held up his hand. Suriana could go on about her antique business for hours if given an excuse. “I’ll go do that inventory now so we can make time for more interesting activities. I suggest you clear your schedule.” He ran a hand down her back and let it rest on her bum.

“Nuh-uh. The captain gets to make the plans, and last I checked I'm the only one who gets to be captain on this ship.”

“Understood, ma’am.” Jack saluted cheerfully. He liked not being captain. Captains were responsible when things went wrong. _He_ was responsible for moving heavy objects, maintenance, odd jobs, and keeping Suriana occupied. He was good at all of those, and a small interstellar antiques business didn’t produce many more complicated problems.

“That’s right, cabin boy.” She smirked. “Now that that's settled, I like your proposal. See you in an hour.”

She planted a kiss on his lips. Jack responded with enthusiasm.

“One more thing. If you’re leaving, I’d appreciate if you _tell_ me.”

Jack gaped at her. “Who said I was leaving?”

“I’m not blind, you know. Whenever I've mentioned stops after this one, you start looking all closed down. You came with good references, but you didn’t work with any of them for more than a few weeks. You’ve been with me two months. If now’s the time you gotta go, fine. Don’t just leave me wondering where you got to when it comes time to load up. It’ll slow up my schedule _and_ drive me six sorts of crazy with wondering what sort of trouble you found.”

“I…haven’t decided yet,” Jack said, truthfully. He knew he should leave soon, before he got any more comfortable and attached than he already was, but he didn’t really want to, not just yet. Despite her warm personality, Suriana didn’t ask too many questions, and she was tough and capable. He needed to be around people who weren’t easily broken.

None of his Torchwood team had been fragile, and it hadn't saved them. He should really go before Suriana went the way of Ianto and all the others who'd gotten too close to him. Still, it wouldn't hurt to put it off one more stop, would it? His time with Suriana had been his longest stretch without major trouble since he left Earth, and there was no reason it was likely to end just yet.

“That’s fine, sugar," Suriana assured him. "You’re welcome here as long or as short as you like. Just figure it out soon, and whatever you choose, _do_ try not to get arrested or blow anything up while we’re here.”

* * * * * * *

 _Parnialus Station_

An instrument panel exploded, showering Jack with sparks. Giving up and retreating, Jack stumbled over an arm. One of the bodies had moved. Somehow, the person was alive and dragging himself across the floor. Jack heaved the survivor over his shoulder with the strength of adrenaline and staggered out into the corridor, sealing the door behind him. He hurried through the corridors until he found an emergency equipment storage locker. The man over his shoulders wasn’t breathing regularly, so Jack set his charge on the floor and jammed a breathing mask over his face as quickly as possible. While the oxygen started flowing, Jack beat out the sparks from the man’s charred shoulder-length hair and battered dark clothes.

Checking his patient’s wrist, Jack felt a pulse racing strangely…but the people on this station, however close to human they looked, were mostly Meeviopites. Jack had never felt Suriana’s pulse do anything like this, but he didn’t know what changes might happen under stress, nor did he know what constituted normal for any of the other humanoid species that might be present here. The man still wasn’t breathing, though, and that couldn’t be right. Time to see if mouth-to-mouth worked on this species. Before Jack could pull off the breathing mask, however, the man suddenly took a huge gasping breath, then another. After a third breath he opened his eyes, the only part of his face visible through the breathing mask. Jack’s jaw dropped.

The eyes were ice blue and deep enough to drown in. Jack knew; he’d done it before. Right now, those familiar eyes were practically sparking with fury.

The Doctor yanked off the breathing mask and tossed it aside. “What the hell did you do that for?” he growled.

“I just saved your life!” Jack said, feeling rather surprised by that fact himself. The smoke in the reactor chamber and the breathing mask (and wasn’t _that_ funny given how Jack had met this Doctor?) out here had kept him from getting a good look at the Doctor’s soot-darkened face. No wonder he hadn’t recognized him under that mysteriously long hair and without his trademark leather jacket…and something else he’d never seen this Doctor without. “Where’s Rose?” Jack said, tensing himself to dash back into the fire.

“Rose…friend of yours? If she was in there, she’s dead. I’m sorry.” The Doctor’s voice was brusque but sympathetic, without a trace of recognition. “Don’t go charging in there after her. It was stupid enough coming after me. You coulda been killed.”

“You’re not the only one tougher than he looks, Doctor,” Jack said wryly.

The Doctor examined Jack with new interest. Suddenly his eyes widened as he pressed back against the wall, farther from Jack. An unconscious movement, probably. “What are you?”

Jack allowed himself a second to close his eyes and swallow before trying to speak. Of course. Even not knowing him, the Doctor could see. “A fixed point. That’s what you’ll tell me, later. A friend.”

The Doctor nodded, accepting the twisted timelines with the smoothness of an experienced time traveler, though his guarded posture suggested that he didn’t yet trust Jack completely, or perhaps was just thoroughly discomfited by Jack’s immortality. Then his face shifted, growing pinched. “Do I do this to you?”

“No!” Jack insisted. “It was an accident. A mistake–not yours–and it was made out of love.” Remembering Rose and what little the Doctor had eventually told him about the events on the Game Station, Jack felt a little guilty at how often he’d cursed his immortality lately. Only a little, though.

Whatever made up its surface, the road to hell led to the same place. He could never _blame_ Rose, and he'd given up blaming the Doctor for this particular problem, but sometimes good people did bad things. (And sometimes not-so-good people who were trying to be better did things so unspeakably awful that they could never atone, but that was another issue.)

The Doctor didn’t look entirely convinced at this exoneration, but he let it slide. “I can forget this meeting if I need to avoid a paradox.”

“Thanks.” Jack stuck out his hand. “Captain Jack Harkness.”

“Captain, eh? What sort of ship?” The Doctor shook Jack’s hand firmly. Jack mentally kicked himself for using that title in his introduction rather than the pseudonym Suriana and his other recent acquaintances knew him by, but it felt wrong to give the Doctor a name other than the one he’d held in the TARDIS. Also, his current pseudonym would raise questions of its own.

“It’s an honorary title at the moment.” Jack had thought about getting a ship, but if he had the freedom of his own transport it would be too tempting to go back to Earth, just to check on the people he’d left behind. He dared not do that. Besides, Jack suspected he was harder to track as a hitchhiker or hired hand than a ship owner (even a hitchhiker who occasionally found himself in charge of averting disaster…some habits were hard to break). Anonymity was important. He’d been avoiding the pinstriped Doctor for over two years now. (Or was it three? More? He didn’t really know how long it had been since he’d left Earth, and he didn’t care.) A Doctor who didn’t know him yet, on the other hand, would have no lectures he didn’t need or sympathy he couldn’t bear.

The lights in the corridor flickered, and somewhere nearby a warning klaxon sounded. “We should go. It’s not safe here, and the evacuation fleet won’t wait for me forever. Where’d you park the TARDIS?”

“Deck five, storage area three.”

Jack drew back. “Shit. One of the explosions vented through there. The hull breached and everything in that storage area that wasn’t destroyed was sucked into space.”

“What?” The Doctor stood up faster than Jack would have thought possible and raced to the nearest computer terminal. “No no no! It can’t be.” He typed frantically, scanning the space station for the TARDIS. The scans came up blank. The Doctor used some harsh language Jack had never heard from him before and ran the scans again…and again…and again.

The Doctor turned to Jack, his expression terribly empty. His voice broke a little as he said, “She’s all I have left.”

“Hey,” Jack said, taking the Doctor by the shoulders with both hands. “The TARDIS could have survived that explosion, right? The station’s sensors can’t be functioning at full power with all those reactor problems. We’ll get on one of the evacuation ships. You can get some better scanners and find the TARDIS floating around out there. No problem.” He couldn’t resist tucking a lock of the Doctor’s charred hair behind his ear. (So odd to see that familiar face softened by long hair! He wondered when and why the Doctor cut it.) Jack smiled confidently, though he was deeply unsettled to see the Doctor so fragile. He hadn’t seen this incarnation of the Doctor like this except for their last day together, when they’d thought Rose was dead and then discovered the Dalek fleet.

“Of course,” the Doctor said, shaking himself. He ran one last scan, then dashed off towards the ship docks without warning. Jack followed.

* * * * *

The docks were crowded with frightened people and their baggage, but the life support system was stable on this deck and the mood stopped short of panic. Jack allowed himself just a moment of pride for helping to buy them this time to evacuate. It hadn’t been enough to save those engineers in the reactor control room, though. Never quite fast enough, never quite smart enough, never quite good enough…but those thoughts were nothing new, and this wasn’t the time to go through them again. He scanned the crowd.

“We’re looking for Captain Suriana Pollves,” Jack informed the Doctor. “Blond hair, almost my height, that sort of orange-ish skin the Meeviopites have sometimes that looks like a really bad fake tan, tough enough to beat a yeti in a fistfight, great smile. Drives a cute little merchant ship called the Rambler Belle.” Some sort of ingrained response to the presence of this version of the Doctor, a vision from what now seemed like an impossibly innocent time in Jack’s life, prompted him to add, “She’s my latest ride, in more ways than one.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes. That, Jack thought, was a good sign. The Doctor had outwardly recovered quickly from the bleak moment in the corridor. An even better sign was the woman waving at him from across the crowd.

“Harry! Get your pretty ass over here!” she called in Jack’s direction.

“Harry? That’s not the name you gave me,” the Doctor said as they elbowed their way through the crowd.

Jack sighed. This was going to be embarrassing. “You’ll know me as Jack. I needed a new name when I started traveling on my own a while back. I hadn’t put much thought into it until someone asked me, and I spat out the first thing that came to mind.”

“Got a surname to go with Harry?”

Jack muttered something unintelligible.

“What was that?”

Looking at the floor as an alternative to the Doctor, Jack muttered slightly louder, “Potter.”

The Doctor barked with laughter. Jack was about to snap something back, but he was finally within reach of Suriana. She swept Jack into a crushing hug.

“By goddess Eopi’s tits, you certainly took your time, Potter! Thought we were going to have to leave without even knowing if you were alive.”

The Doctor was still sniggering. Jack reached a hand behind his back to flip off the Doctor out of Suriana’s view. He really should have changed his name again, but it hadn’t mattered since he’d taken to the skies, It had been nice to spend time with aliens who knew Earth only as a low-tech backwater planet that occasionally provided amusement by defeating some of the galaxy’s bullies. People out here recognized neither his name nor his sins.

“Suriana! Am I glad to see you! I want you to meet the Doctor. He’s a friend of mine, and he needs a lift.”

Suriana raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I see. You’re late because you were out picking up men,” she teased.

“Only in the most literal sense,” the Doctor quipped. “Carried me out of a burning room, he did.” Jack would never cease to be amazed by the Doctor’s lightning-quick mood swings. Ten minutes ago he seemed on the verge of an emotional breakdown, and now he was bantering (and laughing at Jack’s latest pseudonym, but Jack deserved that).

Looking over the bedraggled Time Lord, Suriana told him sympathetically, “Don’t worry, honey. We’ll find space for you somewhere. Ro and Lavit are already sharing the spare bedroom, but I can put you on the lounge couch and make Nylia a hammock in the cargo hold. She’ll like that.”

“Who are these other passengers?” Jack asked. It had been just him and Suriana on the little ship since she took him on in the Horsehead Nebula two months back, and Jack had liked it that way. Despite her trade in antiques, Suriana lived very much in the moment, which meant that she let Jack’s past stay in the past. Her company was easy and without emotional demands, which was the only reason he'd let himself stay in one situation for so long. Other passengers would bring complications and questions. At least that would make it easier for him to move on at the next port, as he should.

“Ro! Bring your sibs and get over here!” Suriana bellowed. “Harry, Doctor, I want you to meet my kids. These are the special people I was visiting.”

Kids? Jack reeled. She’d said her clan was here, but she'd never mentioned kids. Then again, Meeviopite families tended to be complex and loose. Without regard to gender, those not inclined toward day-to-day parenthood let relatives do most of the childrearing and contributed something else to the clan instead.

Three tow-headed children, two boys and a girl, slipped out of the crowd. A sick feeling took root in Jack’s stomach, growing up through his throat like a choking vine and blossoming into a white haze of pain behind his eyes. Suriana was introducing the kids, but he couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear anything around the terrible whistling in his ears, except it wasn’t whistling but screaming. Steven's screaming–the strange, high drone of his death–filled Jack's mind until there was room for nothing else. The eldest boy was just about Steven’s height and build, and he was looking up at Jack with an expression of eager trust. Suddenly he couldn’t stop imagining what Suriana’s sunny face would look like tear-streaked and furious, and it was all too much.

“I can’t do this,” he burst out, spinning on his heels and walking away without a thought to direction.

“Harry, don’t be like that,” Suriana pleaded, following him. “They’re no trouble. They live with my sister so they can go to school here, but during holidays they’re with me, so they know their way around a ship.”

“You don’t understand,” Jack pleaded. “I shouldn’t….I can’t….” He fought to breathe, though he wasn’t quite sure why he made the effort.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, full of concern.

“Everything!” Jack pulled away from Suriana’s comforting hands and stormed off.

He got away from Suriana, but before he got much farther the Doctor materialized in front of him.

“You’re going to tell me what that was about,” he said, quietly but firmly. When Jack tried to dodge away, the Doctor moved with him. “Not here, not now, but we’re going to get on a different ship, and before we get off again you’re going to tell me.”

“Uh-uh,” said Jack, collecting himself enough to speak. “We find a ship, we find the TARDIS, you leave. You forget me. You don’t need to know about this, not yet.”

“I don’t need to know, but I think you need to tell,” the Doctor said, trying to meet Jack’s evasive gaze.

Jack ignored that. “We’ll start checking with smaller ships–they’ll be more willing to take a detour to pick up the TARDIS–and go from there.” He set off toward the closest ship, gazing straight ahead.

“You’re running from something, Jack,” accused the Doctor.

“I know that. I learned it from the champion,” Jack spat. The Doctor’s face grew stormy. They spoke no more of it for the time.

* * * * * *

 _Umorth Mining Colony, two years earlier_

It was the sort of port where having enough money to drink oneself to death was about the best a person could hope for, and that suited Jack just fine. There were at least a dozen species here, but their faces all blended together under the worn-out expressions and coatings of thick black dust. Jack's feet trudged along to the same tired beat as the other miners. He disappeared underground for twelve hours a day and made himself as unmemorable as possible the rest of the time.

No one he knew would ever find him here among the debtors and the desperate who took jobs on this godforsaken moon. That was why he chose Umorth as his place to disembark from the ship that gave him a lift away from Earth. He'd move on eventually, before anyone noticed that his failure to die of black lung or hopelessness crossed the line from unusual to impossible. For now, though, this was the right place for him. He had no responsibilities beyond the most menial, and no one depended on him for anything other than pulling his share of the dreary work.

Every day he rode the rickety lift down with his team, then trudged through the maze of drilled tunnels and natural caves to the spot they'd been assigned to mine for the veins of rare minerals. In most civilizations advanced enough to set up a colony on an atmosphere-free moon like this, tasks as punishing and menial as this mining would be left to robots, but Umorth's intense electromagnetic field meant that sufficiently shielded equipment was far costlier than living laborers. The work was backbreaking enough that he didn't have to think of anything else during that time. Every night he lay awake for hours, going over his memories of Ianto, Steven, Tosh, Owen, and all the others he'd lost, trying to burn every detail of them into his brain like a brand, an agonizing scar that he'd be able to keep until the end of time. When and if he fell asleep, he dreamed terrible dreams and woke up sweating or shouting, but he was hardly the only man in the dormitory with demons in his past. He just didn't let on that his were larger and stranger than the average.

Jack saw his first body about a week after he arrived. It was wrapped in a tarp and dumped unceremoniously on top of a cart full of ore arriving from the deep levels of the mine. He initially assumed that some miner had succumbed to the black lung during their shift, but that theory of ordinary death was disproved when he was assigned to unload the body and take it to the crematorium. He took one end of the tarp and Vig took the other, but the body was so light Jack could have lifted it alone. This wasn't some scrawny species, though; the booted foot that sagged out of the tarp was huge, attached to a brawny ankle. Viscous red-orange blood dripped out onto Jack's hands.

Jack's expression hardened even further. He bit back the urge to ask questions. These people were not his responsibility. It would be better for everyone if he didn't interfere.

Not questioning or interfering was made easier by the fact that he wasn't quite fluent in the local language. People here spoke Galactic Standard, which was ostensibly the same language he'd grown up speaking, but three thousand years had made a huge difference in the language. Among other changes, those three thousand years included humankind's expansion to the stars and the subsequent cross-pollination of Standard with words from English, Mandarin, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and more. He'd studied a bit of archaic Standard in Time Agent training, enough to have a conversation without resorting to the wrist strap's translator, but the awkwardness of it was yet another reason to avoid other people. Jack was quick with languages, so that excuse wouldn't last more than a few months, but he used it for the time being.

It didn't take long for Jack to see another body, then a third. Despite his best efforts to remain apart from the other miners, he began to hear rumors that something lurked in the deep levels of the mines, never seen but leaving unmistakable signs of its presence in the form of half-eaten corpses and missing people.

"They know it’s down there, Management does. They know, and they won’t do a thing about it. They won’t even put in proper lights in the deep levels. Blokes down there only have the lamps they carry. Cheaper to replace miners than install new circuits. I think management likes having it living down there, because if anyone starts getting ideas above their station, they can be transferred to whatever deep level the thing’s been active on," said Jack's teammate Brodirn.

"Yeah, except the levels keep getting higher and higher. They'll _have_ to do something when it's hitting us everywhere," Ap'ha said, sounding like he was trying to reassure himself.

"It's killing more often too. Used to be maybe one or two a month, now it's every few days, but Management doesn't care. As long as it stays in the tunnels, they don't give a damn. It's easier for them to keep the rumors of this thing from spreading off world than to track that thing down in the maze," Quavt said, staring gloomily into zir beer.

Jack reminded himself again that this was Somebody Else's Problem. These people were mostly headed for a short and unpleasant life anyway. He wasn't in charge of tracking down monsters here. Why bother tracking down monsters anyway, when there were always more?

A bit over a month after his arrival, Jack's team was transferred to level 80, deep in the bowels of the mine. The other six miners were hurling accusations of misbehavior at each other, looking for a scapegoat to explain their misfortune. Jack just shouldered his tools and waited for them to come around to the inevitable. Trying to resist the assignment would bring bad consequences much more certain than the mystery monster that might or might not eat them. He idly wondered whether coming back to life after being devoured by a monster would be easier or harder than coming back after exploding. He suspected that coming back from a half-eaten corpse wouldn't be quite so bad, but what if the creature ate the majority of him? Would he resurrect in the beast's guts instead?

The air was fouler in the deep levels of the mine, the tunnels narrower, and the workers already down there projected an aura of fear even more powerful than their exhaustion. They always, always moved in teams, not even going off alone to piss. There were no lights but the miners’ lanterns and headlamps. Three days after their transfer, Jack called out for Brodirn to pass the pulse chisel. No one answered. He focused his light where Brodirn had been working, a few steps away at the end of their small group. There was no one there, just a trail of blood glinting wetly on the floor. Jack shouted, and the team charged down the corridor, waving lights and equipment.

When they found Brodirn, his ribcage had been ripped open and his torso hollowed out. Jack saw the bite marks on his face and legs, automatically estimating the size and shape of the jaws that had seized him (over half a meter wide at the base of a blunt muzzle, wedge-like teeth maybe seven centimeters long). Whatever had killed him was already gone. Vig, the biggest, most-thuggish person on the team, retched. Jack grabbed Quavt and went to fetch a cart. He’d seen worse. Frequently, worse had been his own body.

Before the team went to bed, a message arrived from Management that their morning assignment was to head back to the exact same spot that Brodirn had died. The ore didn't vanish because of some bloodstains on the ground.

"What do we do?" Quavt asked in a hushed voice. "Do we just let it pick us off, one by one?"

Their eyes roamed among each other, eventually all settling on Jack. He had never made any move toward leadership, hardly saying a word except when spoken to. Yet somehow, they were all looking to him to save their lives. He supposed it was his age. He'd once assumed the way people just _listened_ to the Doctor was mostly due to the Doctor being a Time Lord and a genius, but as the decades of Jack's life had grown unnaturally long, he'd realized that his own already impressive charisma seemed to be growing. People unconsciously sensed great age and assumed it meant authority. That phenomenon had been useful in running Torchwood, but not useful enough, and it was damn inconvenient now.

"What else _can_ we do?" Jack said, refusing to meet their eyes. Nobody had an answer.

That night, he dreamt that he was feeling his way through thick fog. A shriek tore open the silence, and a dark shape loomed out of the fog. It was the 456, horrible heads waving wildly in and out of visibility. A wave of dread broke over Jack; he knew with the certainty of dreams that it was about to show him the captive child that he had given it so many years ago. He tried to move away, but found himself frozen in place. The alien shifted, revealing not a child but Brodirn attached to its body, accusing eyes staring at Jack.

“You gave us to them,” Brodirn accused, but his voice was high as a child’s.

“No!” Jack shook his head vehemently. “I did nothing.”

“Exactly,” Ianto’s voice whispered in his ear. Jack whipped around, but his lover was nowhere to be seen. He took a step, and that was when he found Ianto. He was lying on the ground, wearing miner’s gear, a bloody gape where his chest had been.

Jack woke with a gasp almost as sharp as a resurrection. He pulled the scratchy blanket over his head and tried to think of nothing, or maybe of ore and cheap ale and whatever else normal miners thought of, anything but responsibility and death. He really, really tried. It didn't work.

When the team met the next morning, faces gray (or other species-appropriate color indicating feeling unwell), Jack felt sick to his stomach too. Nevertheless, he cleared his throat to attract their attention.

"Listen," he said. "Here's the plan."

He explained it to them, stumbling only occasionally over the words. Ten hours later, the beast was dead, along with its nest of nearly grown larvae that accounted for its recent increase in appetite. Sixteen hours after that, Management had been ousted and a committee of workers occupied their offices. Seven hours after that, Jack had dodged all attempts to put him in charge and gotten onto a ship headed…somewhere else. Anywhere he wouldn't have to do any more heroics. He was quite determined to make this heroism business a fluke.

Six days later, he broke up a criminal organization kidnapping teenage Rrirrilonians into forced prostitution. He couldn't seem to help himself.

  
* * * * * *


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack and the Ninth Doctor cope with a spaceship full of refugees and the weight of their own pasts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to my amazing beta, wendymr. The Macbeth quote in this chapter is from Act V, v, 19-23.

_Outbound from Parnialus Station, Earth year 2012_

  
In the end, the Doctor and Jack ended up on a midsize cargo ship that had emptied its hold in order to house over two hundred space station residents. It was crowded, but at least there were no young kids. Unfortunately, the ship’s captain refused to deviate from course to go searching for the TARDIS, so the Doctor would have to take the overnight journey to the nearest planet and find a lift back.

This put the Doctor in a foul mood, and Jack was no better. He needed to get away from the Doctor. It was too good to be in the company of the Doctor ( _this_ Doctor, the one with the cheekbones he’d dreamed about for a century, the one he’d died for when it still mattered). This Doctor didn’t even know Jack had once nearly destroyed the Earth through a careless con, much less his latest sins. It was too painful knowing that this trusting companionship had to end soon and worse knowing that it _should_ end because he, Jack, had fucked up beyond all hope of forgiveness.

When they had laid claim to patches of floor space packed in with the other refugees, the Doctor started to eye Jack like he might ask about Jack’s response to the children. Jack promptly left for a trip to the toilet. That was when he discovered that the ship’s waste management and water recycling systems, meant to handle about two dozen crew, couldn’t cope with the increased traffic. The ship’s crewmembers trying to sort the problem were clearly not skilled plumbers, nor were any of the increasingly restive people in the queue. Riot seemed inevitable, possibly with a bit of disease outbreak on the side.

"Doctor!" he shouted over the crowds. "Time for some more heroics." The Doctor dashed over wearing his trouble grin, which to his credit drooped only slightly when he saw the actual situation. They went to work.

Much later, after some truly innovative plumbing rerouting, organizational support to the ship’s overwhelmed leaders, a few friendly bathroom signs suggesting "if it's yellow, let it mellow," and two plungers that were now significantly more sonic, Jack and the Doctor were able to call it a day. The second mate had given up his private cabin to them in thanks for their septic heroism, assuming that the two of them would share. Jack wondered if he was too obvious.

“Geez, Doc, I’ve always thought you were a good man to have around when the shit hits the fan, but today was unusually literal,” Jack said, wrinkling his nose at the scent coming from the Time Lord.

“An entire platoon of Judoon couldn’t delay my shower right now. Don’t you try,” the Doctor growled, making a beeline for the bathroom. Jack, by some lucky fluke almost completely clean, raised his hands in mock surrender.

“Throw your clothes out. I’ll do some laundry,” Jack suggested.

“Return them or else I strand you in the Slurping Swamps of Sovort,” the Doctor shot back, unlacing his boots.

“Don’t you trust me?” Jack said in a teasing tone, the banter an unconscious old habit. The Doctor, however, cocked his head and studied Jack, suddenly all seriousness. Jack felt like the Doctor could see through his skin as if it were glass, straight into his stained soul. He fought back the impulse to hide and braced himself to be judged and found wanting.

“Yes, actually,” the Doctor announced. He vanished into the bathroom, leaving Jack reeling. Black jeans, black turtleneck jumper, black socks, and black boxers were slid out, and Jack heard the water start. As he headed off to the laundry room, he reflected that the Doctor’s powers of judgment through staring seemed to be overrated. All the more important, then, that he get away from the Doctor without giving away too much about his past. He couldn’t bear to imagine the Doctor’s reaction to learning how badly his trust was misplaced.

* * * * *

“I have good news, and I have bad news,” announced Jack, wheeling a small trolley into the room. The Doctor, towel wrapped around his waist, was standing at the window, staring at the stars. “Good news number one is that I did laundry. Bad news number one is that apparently I’m going to the Slurping Swamps of Sovort, because the washing robots got confused by the scorching and tears on your jumper and ended up shredding it into this.” Jack displayed a fluffy pile of wool with a nice fresh scent and no resemblance to a jumper.

“What’s the rest of the news?” the Doctor grumbled, scowling at the remains of his jumper.

“Good news number two, in an effort to avoid my swampy fate, I brought back some food. Bad news number two is that there is nothing on this ship bearing even the vaguest resemblance to tea. Good news number three is that some entrepreneurial soul brought aboard a stash of Maotish spice mead, and I have procured some for an only mildly extortionate price. Mixed news is that I asked around to find you an extra shirt, but all I could track down was this.” He held aloft a bright purple t-shirt advertising the fourth annual Orion Nebula yodeling contest.

“Captain, I’m disappointed. A pretty thing like you, reeking of fifty-first century pheromones, should have an easy time talking people out of their clothing.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I’ve been a bit off my game lately,” Jack grumbled. The Doctor’s face shifted, growing intent, and Jack knew that he was about to start pushing for details of why Jack was off his game. A distraction was in order. “I don’t know about you, Doc, but I could eat a horse with a side of chips.”

“You want either of those things in this century, you’d be better off heading to Earth.” There was a question in the Doctor’s voice, but he wasn’t pushing it. Yet.

“I’d rather get my wristband fixed so I can try a different century. You haven’t lived until you’ve had chips from Big Uncle Xoxor’s Chip Shack on New Liverpool, thirty-eighth century.”

“That tourist trap? The chips are good, I grant you, but there’s no atmosphere. If you want chips on New Liverpool, there's this hole in the wall in Ringoville…” The Doctor hurtled off on a tangent, and the conversation stayed nice and safe until the food was gone. When there was nothing left to eat, a brief lull in the conversation gave the Doctor an opportunity to develop a thoughtful look that didn’t bode well for Jack’s privacy.

“So where were you before this, Doctor?” Jack asked, trying to preempt any unwanted questions.

“Troy,” the Doctor said, too shortly.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Troy! How was it?” asked Jack.

“Big wooden horse. Walls fell, everybody died. Well, just about.” The Doctor stared at the dirty dishes as if he intended to use lingering rage about the fall of Troy to scour them clean.

“Bad day. I’m sorry. How about before that?” Jack hoped to get the Doctor talking again, preferably about something cheerful. At first the Doctor didn’t answer, pouring himself another drink and gulping half of it down. “Doctor? Where were you before Troy?”

The Doctor looked up, and Jack recoiled. Something about the set of his jaw and the shadows under his eyes suggested profound sorrow, and trying to actually meet the Time Lord’s eyes was like skydiving into a hurricane.

Jack cursed himself silently. Stupid, stupid! He’d been too wrapped up in himself to think about the Doctor’s personal timeline. He should have realized that this incarnation before meeting Rose couldn’t be far past the Time War. No wonder the Doctor had been behaving a little oddly.

Of the two incarnations of the Doctor that Jack knew, he tended to think of this one as grumpier, harsher in words, but happier despite the gruff exterior. Oh, from time to time Jack had seen flashes of sharp grief about the loss of his people, but he'd seemed to be dealing with them. The pinstriped Doctor was friendlier, quicker to smile, but carrying a greater burden of sorrow underneath. Now, Jack considered that he had only known the big-eared Doctor after months of Rose’s steadying influence and the pinstriped Doctor only after losing her, and mostly during the horrific reign of the Master. At this moment, no one and nothing sheltered the Doctor from the immediate memories of the Time War. Jack had clearly poked at an unhealed wound, and he knew such pain from the inside far too well.

He stretched his hand across the table and laid it across the Doctor’s hand. Voice choked, Jack said, “I am so sorry.”

The Doctor turned his head away, though he left his hand under Jack’s. Jack stared at their hands. Handsome hands on both of them, strong and lightly calloused from work but still able to be delicate. You wouldn’t think from looking at them that these two pairs of hands had been covered in so much blood. The silence stretched between them, thick as fog in a graveyard.

“Let’s get some sleep,” Jack said at last. Neither of them needed sleep the way an ordinary human did, but it was something easier than trying to find conversation.

“Yeah.” The Doctor, last of the Time Lords, stood and began clearing the dishes.

* * * * *

In the end, they shared the bed. Jack tried to take the floor, not from any chivalry or propriety but to protect his own sanity from the strangeness of lying next to the man he’d loved and lost, the man whose ideals had so profoundly shaped him until he failed them so completely. He couldn’t explain that, though, and the Doctor just told him to stop being an idiot. The blankets had gone to the refugees in the hold without beds, so Jack spread his long wool coat over both of them. They settled in to sleep. Jack hadn’t needed to sleep since he became immortal, but he found it both convenient when sharing a bed and good for his mental state to spend a few hours a night asleep.

Some obscure hour of the night, Jack awoke suddenly, heart pounding and nerves on edge. Instinctively groping for the gun he wasn’t wearing, he listened intently to figure out what had woken him. For once, he hadn’t been dreaming, so something must be wrong. Nothing stirred in the room. The Doctor was apparently still sound asleep with his arms flung out to take up most of the bed, hand brushing up against Jack’s side. Still, Jack couldn’t shake a sense of dread. He risked a little light from his wrist strap. Nothing looked wrong, but Jack decided to get up to check more carefully.

He gently moved the Doctor’s hand away. As soon as the contact ceased, the sensation of dread eased markedly. That was strange. Jack touched the Doctor again and immediately tensed up.

The Doctor, Jack knew, was moderately telepathic, especially with the aid of touch. Was he projecting something? The Doctor had never done anything like that before in Jack’s presence. In sleep, though, he might be doing so unintentionally. Moving his light to take a closer look at the Doctor’s face, Jack saw that its features were tense and distressed while the Doctor’s eyelids twitched softly with the movement of the eyeballs underneath. A nightmare, then. Jack knew the feeling.

“Doctor?” Jack spoke softly, putting a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder. “You’re dreaming.”

No response. “Wake up, Doctor,” he said, louder, shaking the Doctor gently.

Wild blue eyes flew open. The Doctor’s limbs flailed in panic. Fierce terror seized Jack, swirling with a soul-burning sorrow and loneliness that gaped like a bottomless crevasse. Jack grabbed the Doctor and held on, fighting the urge to run. _Run far away, somewhere safe, somewhere no one would know, somewhere he could escape the sight of that terrible fire, but it would never work because every time he closed his eyes he saw lightning and the fires burning, burning, burning in a ravenous blackness that was_ all his fault, _no matter that_ they _had wanted something even worse,_ this _was his doing, oh dear Romana, his fault._

The flood of emotion ceased as abruptly as water from a tap. The Doctor stopped thrashing and his eyes gained focus. Jack sighed in relief.

“Sorry if I woke you,” the Doctor mumbled. “You all right?”

“Been better, but yeah. You’re not, though.” Jack was all for giving people privacy to deal with their problems in their own ways, but there was grief and then there was the hurricane in the Doctor’s head, and there was no way Jack was going to ignore someone in the grip of the latter. And here the Doctor was asking if _he_ was all right.

“Don’t worry about me. ‘S normal.” The Doctor rolled away from Jack and lay on his stomach, head turned aside. “As you just found out, sometimes my shields weaken when I'm asleep. Understand if you want to move to the floor.”

Jack switched off the wrist light and scooted close to the Doctor’s side, almost touching. The Doctor tensed, but he didn’t push Jack away. “Don’t be an idiot. I’m not leaving you alone after that. What if you have another one?”

“You shouldn’t have to deal with that,” the Doctor insisted harshly.

“And you should?”

The Doctor didn’t answer. Jack thought the Time Lord might be trembling just a bit, unless that was him.

“Maybe we both should,” Jack said quietly, staring up into the darkness. “There’s a reason why I acted so strangely when I saw Suriana’s kids. I used to have nightmares about it almost every time I slept. Not as loud or quite so large-scale as yours, but still really bad and with way too much basis in reality. The past few months, though, the nightmares haven’t come quite as often. The pain’s still there, and it pops out sometimes like today, but I just…I don’t feel it at full strength every single second. It’s not like I’ve made things right or reached some sort of absolution. No way to do that. Maybe I needed you to remind me.”

The Doctor made a noncommittal hmm noise. After a few heartbeats of silence, he turned his face toward Jack and posed a question. “This thing you’re running from, Jack…was it something that happened to you or something you did?”

“Both. Lots of both.”

“You lost people?”

“God, yes. Sometimes I wasn’t good enough to save them. Sometimes by my hand.” In the intimacy of the bed and the privacy of the darkness, Jack found himself compelled to answer with honesty he would never have dared in the light of day. His closed eyes stung with the image of Steven’s face, a startling burst of crimson dribbling from his nose. His throat felt tight with the pressure of all the things he'd never told Ianto.

“I take it you did it to keep something even worse from happening.” The Doctor’s tone loaded the words with bitterness.

“No choice. The cost of losing was beyond imagining. So I saved the world and lost too many of my reasons for staying there.”

“But you have to go on living through the pyrrhic so-called victory.” The Doctor’s voice was unsteady.

Jack tasted salt as he answered, “No choice there either.”

The Doctor rolled onto his side and resettled himself against Jack. Jack felt as much as heard the Time Lord whisper raggedly in his ear, “Does it hurt like someone cutting your beating heart out of your chest?”

“Yeah.” One syllable, too small to carry the heaviness of so much guilt and grief, but Jack knew he was with perhaps the only person in the universe who could fully hear the oratories of loss compressed into that simple sound,

The Doctor’s hand found his and squeezed hard before releasing. No words, but the gesture was eloquent enough.

 _Me too,_ it said. Also,

 _I’m sorry._ Or perhaps,

 _To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow  
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,  
To the last syllable of recorded time;  
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools  
The way to dusty death. _

As they turned over dark thoughts in silence, a thought struck Jack, the sort of incongruous realization that can’t be ignored. “Actually, I’d say it hurts more like somebody pouring molten lead down your throat.”

“What?”

“Having your heart cut out is a fairly sharp pain that starts at the skin and works inward. Molten lead down your throat burns broadly from the inside and settles low in the gut, and if the lead doesn’t burn its way entirely out you end up with all this heaviness inside of you that just won’t go away. This feeling is more like that.”

“You have a very macabre imagination,” the Doctor said, sounding somewhere between shocked and awed.

“Not imagination. Well, not _my_ imagination. I’m just the one still here to tell the story.” Jack kept his voice nonchalant. He couldn’t let the Doctor know anything about the Master. Even if the Doctor made himself forget this night, memory blocks were rarely perfect. The risk that something could leak through was too great. Time lines were already messed up in the aftermath of the paradox machine, so any change from information Jack gave out now could be disastrous.

“Oh, Jack,” the Doctor breathed, horrified.

“That’s blood under the bridge,” Jack said.

“That’s not how the expression usually goes,” the Doctor pointed out unnecessarily.

“Appropriate, though. Sometimes I wonder how I’m still even vaguely sane.” The things that had happened to him, the things he’d done…Jack no longer had any idea how many times he’d died. It would be easier to go crazy, not to mention appropriate. Jack engaged the darkness in a staring contest. “I just keep on keeping on. Eventually the older memories don’t hurt as much. I wonder if maybe there’s something besides the obvious wrong with me, that somehow I don’t care enough.”

The Doctor took a moment to digest before answering carefully, “I've just met you, Jack, but I'm already sure that you care more than enough. You know what I think? You shouldn’t overlook the obvious. You’re a fixed point. Heal from anything, you can. Maybe that means your mind too. Not as quickly as wounds to your body, especially when you keep reopening the wounds with brooding about them, but quick enough to save your sanity.”

“No! There are things I _need_ to remember,” Jack protested, as if by will alone he could unfix himself in this one aspect. So many things he'd promised to remember: Ianto’s smell, the miniscule twinkle in his eyes when he gave one of his deadpan jokes, the fit of his suits over that excellent rear end, the perfectly balanced bitterness of the coffee he brewed. Would there come a day when he couldn’t remember Ianto clearly at all? When that day came, would he even know what he’d lost? And if he ever forgot what he'd had to do to save the Earth's children, what sort of monster would that make him?

“Didn’t say forget, did I? Just heal, so long as you don’t pick the scabs open too much. Whatever this is that’s killing you like molten lead, I doubt you’ll ever forget it, but sooner or later you won’t run from children.”

Jack didn’t know which aspect of the Doctor’s statement he wanted to argue about more: the implication that he would ever, EVER be anything resembling at peace with what happened when the 456 invaded, or the notion that this possible peace would be acceptable. He wanted to immerse himself in that grief again, make sure he could still feel the full burning heaviness of it, but something about the Doctor’s tone caught Jack’s attention. Maybe he put a slight emphasis on _you,_ just enough to tell Jack that his attention was needed more on the person with him now than those he’d already lost.

“You heal too, Doctor. Maybe not all the way, but it _will_ get better.”

“I regenerate. ‘S not the same.” The Doctor’s voice was dark.

“If you’re trying to insinuate that I shouldn’t have pulled you out of the reactor room, you may be stupider than the stupidest ape,” Jack said in disbelief.

“Course not. You’ve obviously met me looking like this. Can’t have a paradox.” The Doctor practically spat out ‘paradox,’ venomous as only a seasoned time traveler who’s had to face too many tragedies he can’t change.

“Not just that. There’s this girl, this fantastic girl…I shouldn’t tell you too much, even if you’re forgetting. Let’s just say that when I meet you, you _mean_ a lot more of those big, goofy smiles. Sometimes even the Doctor needs someone to heal him.”

The Doctor spoke wearily, dragging his words like a ball and chain. “There’s healing and then there’s hiding, Jack. They’re easily mistaken. I’m all right enough to get by, but you’re about the only thing in the universe that can’t be broken beyond repair.”

“I’m not trying to say your future is all kittens and rainbows, Doc. I wish I could. I’ve seen you better, and I’ve seen you break again, and again, and again. I’m just saying those double Time Lord hearts are bigger on the inside, like the TARDIS, and still growing. One day there will be room in there for something besides the Time War.”

The Doctor drew in his breath sharply. Jack wondered if he’d made a mistake calling the War by name. The Doctor might lash out with angry, defensive words or withdraw from the conversation. He might even break down, as he had after the Master’s death. Jack was prepared for a bad response. He wasn’t prepared for the Doctor’s question.

“Do you know what caused the disaster on Parnialus Station, Jack?” His tone was conversational, as if they’d spent the past ten minutes talking about the weather.

“The reactor core overloaded. It was a fluke of the regulator equipment, a one-in-a-billion accident. Nobody’s fault,” Jack said, but the fact that the Doctor was asking at all meant that this explanation was wrong somehow. He tensed as if expecting a blow.

“The reactor core was hit by a type Q chronowave. Too subtle for Meeviopites or humans to feel, but it was enough to destabilize the reactor. The chronowave was an aftershock of the Time War. The people in the engine room who didn’t make it out died because of the Time War. All these people who lost their home? Displaced by the Time War. And it’s like this everywhere I go. All across the universe: aftershocks, leftover weapons, power vacuums, refugees. That’s not even getting into the routine little paradoxes, dimensional instabilities, and such that need to be cleaned up only there’s no one left but me to do it. Do you see why I’m not gonna move on from the Time War, Jack? There’s nowhere to go.”

“Oh,” said Jack, inadequately, not that there was anything adequate to say. After a second, he added a heartfelt “ _Shit._ ” He simply gathered the Doctor close to him; the Time Lord didn’t resist. Words weren't enough, so Jack spoke in the language of the body he'd always spoken best. Tilting his head, he pressed his lips against the Doctor’s forehead, off center in the darkness. He brushed too-long hair heavy with sweat off that forehead, over and over.

Jack remembered his months traveling around Earth before leaving. Hearing the news had been unbearable. The headlines were filled with the fallout against world governments that had been prepared to sacrifice their children. When other aliens came calling (it was still the 21st century, and things were still changing), the country that had sewn a bomb into his belly tracked him down and begged him to come back and help, and what choice did he have? At least he'd managed to do that bit without interacting with anyone he knew. It had been such a relief to leave all that behind, to put others in charge and go somewhere where nobody cared about Earth or its children and he was just another alien drifter. The Doctor didn’t have the luxury of leaving even the external reminders of his past behind.

Jack held the Doctor for a long time, clinging to him like a large, bony, slightly chilly teddy bear, not sure which of them he hoped to comfort more. Finally he said, “The people I left behind on Earth don’t understand why I ran. Oh, they know the reasons, they understand that I’m grieving, but they think of me as someone who’s so, so strong. I should be there for them, and they’re angry that I’m not. I used to think the same thing about you, once upon a time, and worse things besides. I understand now, every day a little more.”

“I wish for your sake you didn’t.” The Doctor’s hand found its way to Jack’s face, softly tracing his jawline. Jack shivered. There was an intensity between them, building in the air like electrical charge, and Jack knew he had to ground himself. Now.

“If wishes were horses, this spaceship would be even more crowded and smelly,” Jack breezed.

The Doctor snorted. “I don’t think even the TARDIS would be big enough for all of them. It would be a problem.”

“You and I would have to go find a nice quiet ranch where all our wish horses could roam. Our regrets would be a huge herd of cattle, and we’d milk them every day.”

“And every night the consequence chickens would come home to roost,” the Doctor added.

“We’d need cowboy hats,” Jack pronounced solemnly, though he couldn’t keep the tone for long. “Does the TARDIS wardrobe room have cowboy hats? Boots too. Oh, and lassoes! There are all sorts of great things you can do with lassoes…”

“Do I look like a cowboy sort of man?” the Doctor huffed.

“I dunno. Maybe not. You’re mostly a blonde shopgirl sort of man.”

The Doctor puzzled over this for a moment, but apparently decided not to probe. “I’m not sure we can reconcile having a home on the range with the whole wanderer without a home business.”

“You would have to change ‘lonely god’ to ‘lonesome cowboy,’ which doesn’t have quite as much force. Or should we call you the Oncoming Tumbleweed?”

The Doctor’s force of personality somehow communicated an eye roll even when it was far too dark to see the gesture. “What’s your nickname, then? Brokeback Jack?”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Why Doctor, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or saddened when the Doctor failed to respond with something like “I don’t…yet.”

“I’m capable of all sorts of things, when need be,” the Time Lord said instead in a tone so neutral that Jack couldn’t tell if that it was invitation or self-recrimination. Either way, it was a shift from the light banter.

“I know,” Jack replied softly, meaning neither innuendo nor genocide. “I never doubted that, not really.”

Jack knew he had more reason than many to distrust, doubt, and even hate the Doctor, and he’d experienced all of those emotions at least in passing. If he’d stayed a coward until the end of his natural life, never traveling with the Doctor or hearing the word Torchwood, he’d never have had to kill his own grandson. He would probably have been able to count the number of long-term lovers who died in his arms on his fingers. He wouldn’t have known what it was to die of molten lead down the throat in either the literal or metaphorical sense.

If he was given the chance to undo his first meeting with the Doctor with a magical “get out of paradox free” card, there was no question what he would do: he would choose the Doctor again. He would not hesitate or waver.

“Then you’re a fool, Captain Harkness.”

“No fool like an old fool, Doctor, and you and I are two of the oldest fools around.”

“Lord, what fools we immortals be,” the Doctor intoned.

“You’re not, though,” said Jack. “Not truly immortal, I mean. Fool is debatable.” Jack knew there were deaths the Doctor couldn't regenerate from, and he knew that Time Lords could even choose not to regenerate from something as simple as a gunshot wound. Jack wondered at the Doctor’s ability to refrain from that choice, after all he’d lost and done. Himself, he couldn’t have done it. In the aftermath of the 456, only the recent evidence that not even complete explosion could kill him had kept Jack from exploring the limits of his curse; he did not live by choice.

“Close enough for most purposes,” the Doctor sighed.

“Not for mine.” The words slipped out of Jack before he could think to stop them.

Oh, this was dangerous ground, but Jack found himself far out on it and unable to back out. He was overcome by sudden horror at the prospect of someday losing the Doctor. As hard as he had tried to avoid the Doctor since leaving Earth, he couldn’t bear the thought of a universe where he would never run into the Doctor again. (He tried not to imagine the possibility that the reason the Doctor hadn’t responded to the distress calls from Earth was that this was already the case.) Jack knew he was a better man because of the knowledge that somewhere out there was someone he trusted as a higher authority. He needed to know that someone knew him to the core with all his faults, seeing him more clearly than the beloved twenty-first century humans who couldn’t let go of just a little bit of awe. He needed to know that this someone trusted him anyway.

Though he had avoided the Doctor after the 456 out of the conscious fear of the Doctor’s condemnation, Jack realized now that somewhere deep inside he had always understood that the Doctor would forgive him. The man who had forgiven the Master for the conquest of Earth would surely forgive Jack for saving it, knowing himself the terrible calculus of necessity.

The Doctor’s hand found Jack’s and twined fingers. “I’m here now,” he said, once again proving his ability to read Jack like a book even without enough light to make out facial expressions.

Jack tingled with awareness of just how _here_ the Doctor was. He could feel the brush of the fine hairs on the Doctor’s arm against his near where their hands joined. The Doctor’s scent filled his nostrils. There was only so long he could lie in bed with the Doctor while intense emotional discussion wore down his defenses before he succumbed to the temptation to try something foolish. But how foolish was it, really? This Doctor was raw as new skin over a wound. With his world yanked out from under him, he seemed in need of someone to lean on. If Jack kissed him, would he let it happen without responding, as he had on the Game Station? Would he flee from such closeness to Jack’s immortal essence? Or would the intimacy of conversation segue into intimacy of a different sort?

Slowly, as if in a dream, Jack drew their joined hands up to his face and pressed his lips against the back of the Doctor’s hand. He heard a tiny sigh escape the Doctor’s lips.

Then he heard pounding on the door.

* * * *


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _No other human would ever stand on this spot without a thick protective suit. This pain and this beauty were for him alone._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to my ever-helpful beta reader, the fantastic wendymr.

_BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM!_

Jack groaned. That banging probably qualified as the worst timed door knock in his long life. He wondered how many millennia he would have to wait before getting another moment like this, alone with the Doctor without a wall, an apocalypse, or most of the layers of emotional armor they both usually wore. Even if it happened, it wouldn't be with this incarnation. Common sense told him that it was a good thing they'd been interrupted before crossing any lines. The Doctor might never remember, but Jack would have to live with the memory. Jack was still angry at the interruption, common sense be damned.

“How is the plumbing broken again? It’s the middle of the night. How many people are using the john right now?”

“We don’t have to answer, you know,” the Doctor said, propping himself on an elbow. It was obviously not a plea to ignore the knock, just a test to see what Jack would do.

“Don’t tempt me, Doc. I might go and hide outside the airlock and leave you to fix everything,” Jack grumbled, but he was already fumbling for the light switch.

The Doctor rolled off the other side of the bed and answered the door with a demanding, “What?”

“Uh, Doctor?” squeaked the young crewmember, obviously cowed by the Time Lord’s grumpy glare. “Are you really a, I mean, is your doctorate, uh, are you a _doctor_ doctor? Of medicine?”

“When I have to be,” said the Doctor, crossing his arms. “What’s the problem?”

“One of the refugees was pregnant. Is pregnant, that is, but not for long. She’s gone into labor. She needs help.”

“Doesn’t this ship have a medical officer?” Jack asked, padding up behind the Doctor.

“Yeah, most of the time. It’s just that tonight he’s drunk as a shipful of cadets on their first shore leave. The stress of getting through that evacuation, you know. He’s down there and trying to sober up, but, errr, not very successfully. Sir.” She stood at attention, perhaps trying to make up for the medic’s drunkenness with her own nervous professionalism. Jack wondered if he’d ever been that young.

“Right then. One baby, coming right up. Or more, if that’s what she has to deliver. You coming, Jack?”

“Think I’ll stay here,” Jack said. He should _not_ be around babies right now. Or ever. Also, more space between him and the Doctor was probably safer.

“Come with me. Might need the help,” the Doctor said evenly, looking at Jack as if he could see straight through his skin and observe the way Jack’s heart clenched at the thought.

“I’ll just get in the way,” Jack claimed. Pleaded.

“Jack.” The Doctor stretched out a hand.

The sound of his name spoken so gently in that Northern accent was like a leash tied around his core. Of course Jack followed it.

* * * * *

The father-to-be was rambling.

“The baby’s not really mine, genetically speaking. Or babies, I suppose—Mabi and I want a surprise on the sex, and we asked our doctor not to tell us anything except whether whatever was in her womb was healthy, not even how many she's carrying. Anyway, we had to go to a sperm bank. I’m a Vodzwyrth, and we’re not cross-fertile with Meeviopites at a cellular level. The external physiology is quite compatible, thank goodness, but the gametes just don't mesh. I’ll be the child’s father in everything but genes, so it doesn’t matter, but I wish I could have given Mabi a pregnancy more like my people’s. We have litters when the young are much smaller. Births are a lot easier on the mother, although carrying five babies around when they get a little larger becomes quite a production. Still, this business of one or two huge children trying to get out of an opening that small makes me nervous. People still die of it sometimes! It’s appalling. Is your species that way?”

It took Jack a moment before he realized that he had to say something. The father, Zyxryx, seemed to be coping with the stress of his wife’s labor by producing a continuous stream of words and pacing rapidly, his hairless skin constantly changing colors with his shifting emotions. His wife had kicked him out into the corridor for causing excessive distraction before Jack and the Doctor arrived, so Jack’s job was to occupy him while the Doctor delivered the baby. Jack had accepted this task gratefully.

“Yeah. It’s a problem,” Jack responded tersely. He was thinking of Alice’s birth. He hadn’t been there, not even to cause distractions and talk some poor stranger’s ear off. The rift had chosen that day to spit out two dozen temporally displaced Vikings, and he had to get them off the streets before they beheaded someone. Lucia said she understood. After all, she was Torchwood too. Nevertheless, Jack was pretty sure that was the day he began to lose her. Alice (Melissa, then) was someone Lucia could love completely who would be able to return that love just as fully. Things with Jack were more complex.

Alice hadn't invited him to come when Steven was born. She'd finally relented to his requests to meet the baby a week after Steven's birth. Jack wished she'd held out.

“No way for a civilized species to function, if you ask me. Still, we can’t help our evolutionary heritage.” Zyxryx’s enormous fan-shaped ears drooped down. “Even once you’ve got the blasted thing out safely, you’ve got to raise it. Hard enough to do that well under normal circumstances, and here we are birthing a child without a home. One pointless, random disaster, and all those lives are gone and the rest of us are refugees. How can we justify bringing a new life into a world where things like this happen?”

How indeed. One ordinary day, one childhood mistake, and all of a sudden your brother is gone, setting in motion a river of grief that will flow across millennia and wash away so much else that is dear to you. One routine mission takes an unexpected turn and you are made into a bomb, and even when the literal explosion is finished you are doom to those you love. Jack had very deliberately left Earth before Gwen gave birth. He couldn’t answer Zyxryx’s question, since he was the last person to have a clue about the answer.

“Jack?” asked Zyxryx. (Jack had given his old name to the people on this spaceship for consistency with what the Doctor called him, though he was considering going back to a pseudonym when the Doctor was gone. He wasn't yet sure if he was ready to be Captain Jack to the universe.) Zyxryx's skin was pale purple, which Jack thought meant concern. “Are you all right?”

Jack realized he’d been letting his maudlin thoughts show on his face. He schooled his expression into something more neutral. “Of course.”

“I appreciate the thought, but you don’t have to lie for my sake. I could use the distraction of someone else’s problems.”

“You really don’t want to hear mine right now.”

Zyxryx twitched his ears forward and examined Jack. “So be it. Is there anything I can do?”

“Just…just sit down a minute. Watching you makes me tired.” Jack took his own advice and slid down the wall of the corridor.

“For you, I will keep still.” Zyxryx sat down beside Jack and patted his hand awkwardly. “I don’t mean to be unreasonably negative. Better to bring up a child with no home than no family. It could have been so much worse. We owe that to you and the Doctor, I hear, along with the great luxury of flush toilets on this ship.”

Jack shrugged. “I’m sorry we couldn’t save Parnialus Station.”

“We can rebuild everything in time, everything except those lives that were lost. You did what you could. Now, your friend the Doctor and my wife do what they can, and we two are left with empty hands. So let us sit together and keep vigil for those we have lost, and for those who will yet be thanks to you.”

Zyxryx finally fell silent. Jack stared down the corridor pensively, but eventually the quiet hum of the ship coming through the floor and the presence of another warm body sitting next to him began to soothe his nerves. He closed his eyes, trying to hear the Doctor’s voice through the wall, but no sound came through. Without intending it, Jack found himself falling asleep.

* * * * *

He awoke when the shoulder under his head stirred. “I’m sorry, Jack, but I really must get up. The Doctor says that the baby is born, and I must go to my wife and daughter. I can’t do that while you use me as a pillow.”

Jack sat up straight and rubbed at his eyes. He was in quite a state if he was falling asleep on someone he barely knew without even having sex first. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t apologize. When I am uneasy, I find that nothing settles me quite so well as taking care of another. Also, unlike the little one who now requires my care, you hardly drooled at all.” Zyxryx smiled gently.

“Zyxryx! Get in here! There’s another one on the way, and I need you to hold the first _now_ ,” the Doctor yelled through the open door.

“Twins?! My heavens!” Zyxryx exclaimed, practically levitating as he leapt up and sprinted into the med bay.

Jack snorted. Had _he_ been that undignified when he finally finished with the Vikings and got to see baby Alice? He didn’t think so. Well, not for long, at any rate. He was fairly certain he’d had enough presence of mind to put down the battleaxe before he made it into the maternity ward.

He stretched, then got up and paced for a bit. He wondered whether he could get away with sneaking back to the cabin, decided the answer was no, and eventually sat back down on the floor. While he was occupying himself by checking the calibration of his wrist strap, the med bay door slid open again.

“Jack! Get in here!” called the Doctor. Jack heard the command in his voice and hurried in.

“What’s the matter?” he asked urgently as he skidded into the room. Everything looked under control. The Doctor was running the sonic screwdriver over one baby while Zyxryx and his wife Mabi cooed over another. The perky young officer who had fetched the Doctor was tidying up, and a chair in the corner held a loudly snoring man in a medical officer’s uniform, evidently the drunken medic.

“Nothing. Both babies are born and everyone’s healthy. I just thought it was time you stopped hiding in the corridor.” The Doctor looked at Jack, daring him to challenge this judgment. Jack took the dare.

“Great! If everything’s fine, I’ll just run to the bridge and ask how long until we reach port,” he said, turning on his heel.

“Come over here, Jack,” the Doctor said, very quiet but firm as stone. Jack stepped closer reluctantly. “Hold him. I need my hands free to record his health data.”

“I shouldn’t…”

“Hold him.” The Doctor stretched out the baby toward Jack. Reluctantly, Jack accepted the burden.

The infant squirmed in Jack’s awkward grasp. Jack adjusted his hold, the movement automatic even after the years since he’d held a newborn. It settled down slightly, staring up at Jack with wide, confused eyes. Like its mother, the child had the darker version of Meeviopite skin, chocolate brown except for a sprinkling of bright yellow freckles. Its fists waved in the air, so tiny and so terribly fragile. Jack fought to keep the shiver that ran up his spine from manifesting on the outside.

“The timelines around a newborn are fantastic,” the Doctor murmured, standing close behind Jack. “They’re so unsettled. Anything’s possible. There are thousands of ways this little boy could die before he reaches adulthood. Thousands more that he could grow up deeply messed up, turning out bitter or mean or even violent. Still, all of those are outnumbered by the timelines where he ends up decently well-adjusted and lives out a normal life, working and playing and falling in love. All those possible lives are so incredibly short to the likes of you and me, gone as fast as butterflies. In a few timelines, though, he might grow up to be a butterfly whose fluttering wings change the winds of the world for the better. In others it's his sister, or one of Suriana’s children, or one of all the other lives that will come into being because their parents lived instead of died on that space station.”

“Which one is real? What becomes of him?” Jack whispered, fearing the answer.

“I don’t know!” The Doctor grinned, apparently delighted with his uncertainty. “It’s all in flux, even more so than with an adult. There are very few fixed events in time, and this child shows no signs of being involved in any of them, as far as I can tell. I wish you could see his timelines, Jack. They’re beautiful.”

“I’m fixed. Should I keep away from him?”

“Different sort of fixed. Your existence is fixed, but most of your path is changeable, not like a fixed event that has to occur just so. You burn like a sun to my senses, but that doesn’t mean you scorch everything that you touch.”

Jack watched the baby. He was nuzzling against Jack’s coat, searching for nonexistent milk. Alice had done the same thing once upon a time, and later Steven. He’d laughed and told his grandson, “Sorry, little man. Not doing that again, even for you.” Now, he’d do almost anything for Steven’s sake. Anything except darken the potential timelines of all those millions of other children.

The newborn had a surprising amount of hair, and the drying he’d received before Jack came into the room left the hair sticking straight up from his head.

“He’s got hair like yours in your next life,” Jack informed the Doctor. The current Doctor looked slightly horrified. The baby expressed its feelings on the comparison by making a small unhappy noise.

“I think he wants his mummy,” Mabi said, passing the baby girl to her husband and holding out her arms for her son. Jack passed him over. As the child left his arms, it began to wail.

“He likes you!” Zyxryx pointed out, amused.

“He doesn’t know what I am,” Jack muttered, but not quite quietly enough.

“He knows you well enough,” the Doctor said, resting a hand for a moment on the small of Jack’s back. Jack shivered.

“Doctor, Jack," Zyxryx said, "Mabi and I have discussed it, and we would like the two of you to have the naming of the babies.”

Jack froze. He should say something. He should be polite and pick a name for the baby. He should, but he didn’t dare. Naming the baby made it _his_ in a way, and people that were _his_ didn’t fare well.

“Thank you. We would be honored,” the Doctor replied. “Jack, why don’t you pick the first name?”

Jack shook his head, trying to make the Doctor understand. The Doctor refused to back down.

“Don’t worry. I’m sure Zyxryx and Mabi will tell you if you pick something culturally inappropriate. It will be okay, Jack,” he reassured Jack, the compassion in his eyes making clear that he knew Jack’s reluctance. He stood close beside Jack, a tower of strength in a ridiculous t-shirt. Jack took courage from his presence. The Doctor needed him do this, so he would manage.

Jack took a deep breath. He realized that he knew what to say. “The boy’s name is Steven.” Within him, there was a feeling like something dissolving. A dam collapsed, and a river ran free at last. “After my grandson.”

“Steeeeven. Exotic, but pleasant. I like it.” Zyxryx rolled the name around in his mouth, oblivious to the moisture building in Jack’s eyes.

The Doctor noticed. Looking more at Jack than at the baby he was naming, he offered something equally momentous. “The girl’s name is Susan. After my granddaughter.”

* * * * *

An hour later, Jack found himself alone in the officers' lounge, watching the planet where they would disembark growing larger in the windows. The Doctor was gone, off to check on Mabi and the children again and then hide from further attempts to make him solve domestic problems. This planet was more like Earth than most places Jack went by choice these days, with broad azure seas and puffs of white cloud drifting over the green and brown of the continents. He forced his mind to quiet down to nothing more than the contemplation of the planet’s beauty, not allowing himself to think about how every mile brought them closer to a way to find the TARDIS and the Doctor's departure. He now understood that one day he would face the pinstriped Doctor and be able to accept his forgiveness, but he wasn't yet prepared to seek him out. Besides, Jack didn’t want to give up the big-eared face he had fallen for so profoundly so long ago and once again in the past day.

Enough of that. Look at the beauty out there, Jack reminded himself. Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat until the end of time.

“Thought I might find you here,” the Doctor said from just behind Jack, having approached silently.

Jack spun around and broke into a grin. “You cut your hair!”

The Doctor fingered his newly buzzed head, looking oddly abashed. “Suppose I did. Never made major hair changes without regenerating since I was a lad, but I really looked at myself in the mirror for the first time and realized it was all wrong. Not sure about this, though. I didn’t realize it would emphasize the ears quite so much.”

“It’s perfect,” Jack said, laying one hand on the Doctor’s shoulder. “It suits you, goofy ears and all.”

“Oi! Who said they were goofy?”

“Me, just now.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes and sighed eloquently.

“Anyway, I think it’s good that you cut your hair. A haircut’s a classic way to mark a break in your life, and I think you needed to do this yourself, not leave it to regeneration. Plus, if you hadn’t changed it by the time you meet me again, there could've been some sort of hair paradox.”

“Hair paradox? Just what did they teach you in Time Agent training? Anyway, if you've finished with the pop psychology, we’re beginning our descent in just a few minutes.”

“Do you need to go and be backseat driver on the bridge, or will you stay here and watch with me?”

“Watch with you, of course,” the Doctor said, slipping his hand into Jack’s like it was the most natural thing in the world. Jack held the hand like a delicate bird. Later, the leather jacketed Doctor offered his hands mostly to Rose, and pinstriped Doctor was too closed-off to offer many hands by the time Jack met him. It was astonishing and painfully temporary to find himself entrusted with the Doctor's hand, so strong yet so in need of someone to hold onto. For now, though, he could treasure the unexpected grace of a universe that could take, and take, and take some more, but then place this long-lost hand in his. He could try to anchor the Doctor as he sailed his stormy sea, and let the Doctor anchor him in return.

* * * * * *

The ship’s doors opened into bright sunlight that made Jack squint after the dimness of the shipboard lighting. Crowds of anxious relatives and charitable types were waiting for the passengers. The Doctor slipped away on a mission to find transportation back to the wreckage of Parnialus Station to search for the TARDIS, having arranged to meet Jack later. Jack allowed himself to join the anonymous line of refugees being routed past the line of aid workers who asked if he needed housing (no), a job (not now, but he recorded some contact info for future reference), a cup of soup (sure, why not?), grief counseling (Jack scared the earnest matronly lady at the desk with the way he laughed at this offer), and some extra clothing (his goal). Having lost the few possessions he didn’t have in his pockets, Jack wanted to pick up a few spare pairs of socks and underwear, a clean shirt, and a small bag to carry it. While rummaging through the bins of donated clothing for a shirt, Jack found something that made a smile blossom on his face.

An hour later, the Doctor strolled up to their prearranged meeting spot looking satisfied. “I rented a speedy little ship that will get us back in a quarter of the time it took us to get here. I’ve stocked it and modified the sensors to find the TARDIS. What have you done with your time?”

“I got you a present,” Jack said. He held up a leather jacket. _The_ leather jacket. The Doctor’s eyes widened slightly. He’d never seen it before, but his interest was clearly piqued. He took the jacket from Jack and shrugged it on over the yodeling competition t-shirt.

“This is a step up from your last attempt to be my personal shopper,” the Doctor quipped, moving his arms around to check the fit. As expected, it was perfect.

“Yeah, well, it was this or some coat that looked like it was vomited up by a rainbow. I flipped a coin.”

The Doctor looked unexpectedly lost in thought. “You know, I think I might have been on this planet before.”

Jack gave him a concerned look but decided not to ask. It was time to be underway.

* * * * *

Four fairly uneventful hours later, the conversation consisting mostly of the Doctor teaching Jack the engineering tricks he was using on the ship’s sensors to increase their ability to home in on the TARDIS, they reached the wreckage of Parnialus Station. The explosion after the evacuation fleet departed had torn the space station into three large pieces and a huge field of debris orbiting over uninhabitable Parnial below. Several rough-looking salvage ships were already picking through the wreckage. Jack hoped none of them had salvaged a little blue box yet. That could get messy.

The Doctor flicked the switch to turn on the high-powered scans, looking for his beloved time machine. For the first time since delivering the babies, the Doctor’s cheerful mask slipped off completely, allowing Jack to read the tension in his stance.

“We’re going to find her, Doctor,” Jack said. He was certain of it. After all, he was a fixed point, and he couldn’t have become fixed if the Doctor never introduced Rose Tyler to the TARDIS. Time insisted that the Doctor have his TARDIS.

“I know,” the Doctor said with a thin smile that implied that even for Time Lords there was a difference between knowing something logically and believing it in one’s bones.

The scan came up empty. The Doctor recalibrated, broadened the search field, and scanned again. Still nothing. He looked up at Jack with a chilly bleakness in his eyes that tore at Jack’s heart.

“Would we be able to tell if one of the salvage ships had the TARDIS aboard?” Jack asked.

“No ship in this sector of space should have shielding enough to block the artron energy…but a cloud of plutonium dust just might mask it, and that’s exactly the weather on the northern hemisphere of the planet! If I adjust to compensate for the dust storms….” The Doctor fiddled with controls, fingers moving so fast Jack could barely follow. Suddenly his face lit up with a grin as broad as the sky. “Yes! Look! The TARDIS is on the planet!”

A faint speck glowed on the sensor’s display. Caught up in the Doctor’s joy, Jack whooped and gave the Time Lord a high-five.

“Just a few more minutes, Doc, and you’ll be home,” Jack said ebulliently. The Doctor’s face fell.

 _Home._ He’d said home. Mistake. Jack always thought of the Doctor’s home as the TARDIS. (Truth be told, a lot of days he still thought of the TARDIS as his own home, albeit a home he never expected to live in again.) With the wound of Gallifrey’s destruction still raw, however, “home” must be a word loaded with pain for the Doctor. Jack kicked himself for his stupidity, but there was no taking it back now.

“Sorry,” Jack said quietly.

“Yeah.” The Doctor closed his eyes for a second, then opened them to begin the landing sequence.

They brought the tiny rental ship, barely bigger than the Chula ship Jack had piloted lifetimes ago, down through Parnial’s atmosphere. Clouds of radioactive dust, scouring winds, and flickering lighting buffeted the craft.

“Nice place for a holiday, huh?” Jack commented, trying to hold the throttle steady.

“If it were any more pleasant we’d need cocktails with umbrellas. Little farther to the north,” the Doctor said, watching their course.

Finally, Jack caught sight of a patch of blue on the surface below. The craft bucked wildly on the winds as Jack fought to hold them directly over the TARDIS. The Doctor hit the button to turn on the tractor beam and bring the TARDIS rising up toward them. Instead, sparks flew up from the console. The TARDIS stayed where it was.

The Doctor said a few emphatic words that weren’t translated into any languages Jack knew. “Must have crossed the power supply when I was rewiring the sensors. Tractor beam’s fried.”

“Can you fix it?”

“ ‘Course I can fix it! I’m the Doctor. Problem is, it’ll take five hours, maybe longer if this ship is short on spare parts.”

“Probably easier just to land nearby and walk over. Do we have suits?” Jack brought the little craft to a landing near the TARDIS so he didn’t have to worry about crashing while they conversed.

“Nothing that’ll block out these radiation levels.”

“There’s me,” Jack offered, looking over his shoulder to meet the Doctor’s gaze.

“Don’t be daft. The radiation levels are high enough to kill anybody within moments…” The Doctor trailed off, fixing Jack with a slightly horrified stare.

“Once I get into the TARDIS, I can expand the energy shielding enough to let you cross,” Jack said, trying for an all-business attitude that would force away the Doctor’s shock and pity at the reminder of what Jack’s fixed point status meant.

“Are you sure?”

“Geez, Doc, you know the TARDIS’s capabilities better than I do. You tell me if it won’t work.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. Of course I’m sure.” Jack held the Doctor’s gaze a moment, then jumped up and headed for the airlock.

“Use a spacesuit, Jack. Even ignoring the radiation, the atmosphere is high in sulfur dioxide and chlorine with no oxygen. The dust is blowing at over a hundred miles an hour.”

“Dust! Good point.” Jack rummaged around in the ship’s emergency equipment until he found a pair of goggles and a small oxygen mask. A little bit of oxygen would keep him from wasting time by dying halfway to the TARDIS, but there was no point losing the deposit on the rental ship by contaminating an entire spacesuit with Parnial's radioactive dust. The atmosphere was corrosive, but nothing he wouldn't heal from about as fast as the damage was done, and radiation usually didn't affect him at all.

Now came the slightly awkward part. Jack's TARDIS key had been blown up with the Hub. Jack's pride made it hard to ask for one, but he had to. "I need to borrow a key."

The Doctor fixed him with an unreadable stare and declared, "No."

"Err, Doc, this plan won't work if I can't get into the TARDIS," Jack said, trying to ignore the sudden knot in his belly at the Doctor's refusal.

"Obviously. But there's no way you're _borrowing_ a key. You're keeping it," the Doctor said, tossing a key to Jack.

Jack caught it and nodded, not trusting himself to speak right away. He draped his beloved coat safely over a seat, stepped into the airlock, and closed the inner door.

The Doctor hit the button to turn on the comms as the air around Jack began to be slowly replaced with the poisonous atmosphere. “You’re a bit mad, you know.”

“That’s the pot calling the kettle black if I’ve ever heard it,” Jack shot back cheerfully, his voice slightly muffled by the mask. He felt a tingle from the corrosive gases on his skin, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle.

The corner of the Doctor’s mouth twitched upwards, but quickly settled. “Suppose you’re right.” The Doctor shrugged. “You know what I think’s interesting?”

“Brain-splittingly complex physics, bananas, mocking humans, making things more sonic, blondes…want me to go on?”

“You haven’t asked me to go back and change anything. I’ve got a time machine, you’ve had a huge loss, and you’ve never even hinted that I might go back and fix things.”

“Gimme a break, Doc. I learned how dangerous it is to change your personal timeline in the first week of Time Agent training,” Jack snapped. The tightness in his chest had nothing to do with poisonous air.

“I’ve cleaned up after enough messes from Time Agents who decided those rules didn’t apply to them. Most of them were good people who got desperate. Everyone has a breaking point, but somehow yours didn’t make you so careless.”

“Yeah, well, everyone also dies, and look at me.” Jack chewed on his lip, searching for the words to explain. “I couldn’t risk the integrity of time, no matter what I lost. It’s something I learned from you.”

If the Doctor had anything to say in reply to that, it was lost in the sound of the airlock’s outer door opening. The wind struck Jack like an angry mother’s slap. He leaned into it and headed onto the planet’s surface.

Outside, he was surrounded by a landscape of rocks sculpted into improbable shapes by the incessant wind. Every arch and twisted tower glittered with the mineral wealth that had brought the robotic mining operations to this forbidding rock in the first place. The wind played a wild music as it whistled over the jagged land. Overhead, the sky swirled with colorful clouds illuminated by an astonishing firework display of lightning. Jack could feel the pain as his cells succumbed to the formidable radiation and the answering shock of healing welling up from inside him. Bits of him were dying, but Jack felt dizzyingly alive. No other human would ever stand on this spot without a thick protective suit. This pain and this beauty were for him alone.

His wrist strap crackled. “You okay?” the Doctor asked, having evidently figured out how to transmit to the wrist computer. A poisonous atmosphere could carry sound as well as a safe one.

Jack moved closer to a window to give the Doctor a good view of him. He straightened himself against the powerful wind (which was doubtless tousling his hair artfully), gave a thumbs-up sign, and pulled the mask aside long enough to flash a huge, slightly lopsided grin of genuine glee.

“I love a storm!” he shouted into the wind. The Doctor pointed at his wrist, trying to indicate that Jack needed to transmit in order to be heard. Jack just grinned a little wider and readjusted his mask, declining to translate. He leaned into the wind and shuffled toward the TARDIS.

He pulled his new key out of his pocket and slipped it into the lock. The TARDIS greeted him with a worried whine from her engines.

“Easy, beautiful. I know I’m wrong, but I’m not going to hurt you. Just let me help your Doctor get back to you.” Jack paused with his hands resting on the console, giving the TARDIS a minute to scan him before he began working. He felt the ship’s tension setting his own nerves on edge, which wasn’t helping his inevitable sense of hurt at the rejection. When the tension eased slightly, Jack set to work.

It only took a few minutes to set up a protective corridor to allow the Doctor to walk to the TARDIS: blocking out the radiation, exchanging the atmosphere, damping the wind, and even laying a force field underfoot to keep the Doctor’s steps from stirring up radioactive dust. A blurry shimmer in the air delineated the edges of the safe area. He also took a minute to step into a little room the TARDIS brought to just off the console room, where a blast of air and specially calibrated energy fields got rid of the radioactive dust clinging to him. When he was done, Jack addressed the TARDIS.

“I’m going to give you a suggestion for where to take the Doctor some time when he sets you on random, or whenever you feel like ignoring him. It doesn’t have to be right away; maybe take him to a South Pacific beach, or on a cruise, or go and solve some historical mystery first. But I think you’ll like this destination.” Jack went to the keyboard, but instead of entering coordinates he typed two words: _bad wolf._

The TARDIS’s engine sounded out strange new harmonies. The hairs on the back of Jack’s arms prickled.

“I thought you’d know who I meant by that,” Jack said, satisfied. Winking at the TARDIS, he switched on the comms to call over the Doctor. The Time Lord strode out of the little spaceship. Halfway to the TARDIS, he broke into a run.

Jack chuckled as the Doctor dashed through the door and straight to the center console, excited as someone reunited with a lover at the airport arrivals’ gate. The engines purred in welcome. The Doctor starting flipping switches to run diagnostics, cooing to his ship the whole time. Jack was tempted to sneak away quietly, but he knew too well that wasn’t an acceptable way to take leave of somebody.

Jack cleared his throat. “I’ll be going, then.”

“Where’re you off to?” The Doctor seemed to be sizing him up. Jack really hoped he wasn’t about to offer a lift, because he didn’t want to have to muster up the willpower to turn it down.

“Oh, you know. There’s so much universe still to see. Return the rental ship, work enough to finance the travel. Kiss some strangers, save some planets. The usual.” Jack shrugged and spoke in a carefully casual tone.

“Looking for future me?” The Doctor’s expression was neutral. He might have been asking what Jack would have for dinner.

“Eventually. Not quite yet. I’m doing a lot better than I was before, but I still need a little more time to get my feet back under me.”

“Fair enough. Intending to sweep someone else off theirs?” the Doctor asked with raised eyebrows, inexplicably grabbing Jack’s wrist.

“Maybe.” Jack tried to tug his wrist away when the Doctor pulled out the sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the wristcomp. “Hey! The teleport is already nonfunctional. What are you trying to do?”

The Doctor squinted at Jack, confused. “Fix it, obviously. Why, do you like it broken?”

“I, uh…” Jack stammered, floored by the trust. “Thanks, Doc. I owe you one.”

“I already owed you for the leather jacket, not to mention pulling me out of a burning room. Other things, too. If we’re keeping score, I’m in your debt.” A fleeting moment of eye contact, then the Doctor dropped Jack’s wrist.

“Nuh-uh. From my place in the timeline, I owe you for so much more. Too much to quantify.” He should come up with something witty, something like the “wish I’d never met you” he’d used to say goodbye to the Doctor lifetimes ago, but he just couldn’t manage anything other than the truth. Jack owed the Doctor more than he could ever repay: all that he was that was good, his life (when he was mortal), even Ianto and all the other people he’d had a chance to love (and lose) that he would never have met if that misguided con had never led him to Rose and the Doctor.

“Start making it up to me: have a fantastic life, Captain.”

Jack wasn’t sure he could breathe enough to answer, so threw his arm up in a trembling salute. He had more than half a mind to give the Doctor a parting kiss, as he had so long ago on the Game Station, but he didn’t. If he kissed him, he would find out whether or not the Doctor would respond. One result might prevent him from ever letting their timelines untangle, and the other might break his heart. Better to leave that Schrödinger’s cat in the box.

Jack spun on his heels and walked out of the TARDIS, closing the door behind him. He stopped just outside of the rental ship and waved. His bones began to vibrate as the engines ground to life. The blue light on top of the police box flashed like the lightning above. With the sound that always haunted Jack’s dream, the TARDIS vanished and the sound began to fade away.

Strangely, the sound of the TARDIS seemed to echo for far longer than it should. In fact, it stopped fading and began to grow louder. Moments later, the TARDIS reappeared in precisely the same spot.

Jack stared. The wind died down again as the TARDIS projected another protective forcefield. As soon as the ship was solid, the door opened.

“What happened, Doc? You forget something?” Jack called out.

“You,” said the Doctor, hands stuffed in the pockets of his long brown coat as he emerged from the TARDIS. Red converse scuffed the soil of the planet as Jack’s second Doctor ambled over.

* * * * *


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Timelines realign, but Jack realizes there's something off about the Doctor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to my wonderful beta wendymr, who helped this chapter out tremendously.

Jack swallowed hard. He wasn't sure if he wanted to run to the Doctor or away from him, but he fought down both urges. What happened to allowing him to get his feet back under himself? He certainly didn’t feel steady now. Jack wasn't prepared to deal with this man and all the baggage they had between them. Why was Jack's second Doctor here when Jack had told him not to come yet? How did he even know to find this planet?

“You said you were going to wipe this from your memory. How are you here?” Jack demanded.

“Handy Time Lord trick,” the Doctor explained, tapping his temple with a finger. “I buried the memories, but I put in cues to trigger recall when I caught up with your timeline. Good thing I did, too! Otherwise, I would never have known that all this time you’d bought me a drink already! The bottle of Maotish spice mead you bought for us when we were stuck on that ship overnight certainly qualifies. So, how about it, Captain?” He finished with an eyebrow lift that was probably illegal on some planets.

The Doctor’s mannerisms and voice were far too light considering that he must have just remembered the past two days of Jack’s timeline, a lifetime ago for the Doctor, and all the sadness they’d confronted together. Presumably those memories wouldn’t have been triggered unless he’d learned about the 456. Either the Doctor was being even more clueless than usual about human moods and attitudes, or he was concealing something.

“How about what?” asked Jack uneasily.

“This,” said the Doctor, and kissed him.

It wasn’t just a friendly peck, either. The Doctor practically attacked Jack with an aggressive, passionate kiss that made full use of his talented tongue. Throwing one arm around Jack’s waist and burying the other hand in Jack’s hair, the Doctor clung to Jack as if his life depended on it. Jack was glad of the full-body contact; he thought his knees might give way if he weren’t anchored by the Doctor’s wiry strength. All of Jack’s strength seemed to be drawn into the kiss, giving back to the Doctor with all of the fervor with which the Doctor kissed him. When Jack wrapped a hand around the back of the Doctor’s neck, the Time Lord shivered up and down his thin frame. Jack's capacity for rational thought was on the brink of collapsing as thoroughly as his knees, but one troublesome notion refused to let go.

Too much. This was too much to take in, but more importantly it was too much for the Doctor to be offering with so little preamble, never mind what closeness he’d just remembered. Certainly it seemed like an odd thing to offer Jack if he’d just found out what Jack had to do to get rid of the 456. There was an element of desperation in the way the Doctor clung. Fighting to clear his head, Jack reluctantly pulled back from this kiss.

“Doctor, what are you doing?” he asked softly.

“Trying to seduce you, of course. Is it not working?” said the Doctor, as if that action was perfectly normal. His tone was slightly puzzled, as if some mechanical gizmo he’d made wasn’t functioning as expected.

“Why?” This was a surreal conversation. Jack wondered if he'd gone mad and neglected to notice until now.

“Do I need a reason?” The Doctor, having apparently decided the seduction needed a bit more oomph instead of an explanation, leaned in to whisper in Jack’s ear, then reinforced his point by running his tongue along the lobe. Jack’s eyes fluttered closed. It would be so easy to agree with the Doctor.

He forced his eyes open again. “You’ve had plenty of opportunities before. Why now?”

“Consider it encouragement to come with me.” The Doctor smiled, but there was something closed off in his eyes. Jack put the pieces together about why the Doctor would go to such lengths to ensure that he’d get on the TARDIS. The picture those pieces formed was ugly. He angrily pulled away from the Doctor. All of the good will and trust he'd felt toward the Doctor in the past day boiled away.

“So that’s how it is," Jack spat. "You find out the details of what I had to do to get rid of the 456. From up there on your high horse, it looks to you like I’m a danger to others; you can’t think I’m a danger to myself because there’s no such thing. You decide to take me in and fix me, but you want me to come along quietly so you decide to seduce me aboard, thinking I’ll be too pitifully grateful to ask questions. Well, tough. I’ve got questions. What’s your biggest problem with what I did, anyway? Would it have been better to let them have 10% of the world’s children than take one life myself? Are you here to tell me about some technological magic that would have solved the whole problem in five minutes? Or should I have managed to drive off the 456 without killing them? What would you have done, _sir_? Do tell, since you declined to actually come to Earth and _show_ me when it would have done some fucking good!” Jack grew angrier and angrier as he spoke. It wasn’t fair of the Doctor to try to manipulate him like this.

The Doctor wilted visibly. Shoulders hunched, he stared at the ground somewhere to the left of Jack. He muttered, “It’s not like that.”

“No? Then explain.”

“ _Yes_ , I want you aboard the TARDIS. _Yes_ , I thought I could convince you to come along more easily if I offered you something you wanted from me–not that you’re the only one who wanted it. Anyway. I was manipulating you, and I… I should know better. You’re very wrong about one of your assumptions, though.” The Doctor paused for a second and swallowed. “You’re not the one who shouldn’t be left on his own.”

Jack’s ire cooled as if it had been dropped in cold water, though it wasn't yet gone completely. He stared at the Doctor in shock, hardly daring to speculate on what the Doctor meant by that.

“You ask how I would have acted if it had been me instead of you facing the 456. These days, I think the difference is that I would have made the wrong choice.” The Doctor’s voice was rough, as if every word cost him dearly.

Cursing himself for rushing to stupid conclusions, Jack took the Doctor’s chin in his hand and tilted it up until he could look at the dreadful hollowness in the Doctor’s eyes. He looked vastly older than Jack had ever seen him.

“Want to tell me what happened?” he asked as gently as he could.

“I’ve been travelling on my own for a long time, Jack. Years. After Donna, I thought it was better. I was wrong. Do you know about Bowie Base One, the first human colony on Mars?”

Jack’s blood ran cold. The twenty-first century had been ancient history when he grew up, but that was one story that still got taught in Time Agent training. “It was destroyed. Almost everybody died.”

“Bowie Base was _supposed_ to leave absolutely everybody dead. It’s a fixed point in time. Fixed points are fragile. Even slight changes can cause damage to the space-time continuum, potentially catastrophic damage. Sensible time travelers steer clear. I ended up there accidentally. I tried to walk away, Jack. I meant to. But I could hear them dying. I knew all I had to do was stretch out my hand and I could stop the screaming. So I did. I very nearly brought the universe down on my own head, and it wasn’t me who had the courage to set it right. Haven’t had a lot of courage lately, not since I found out that I was going to die.”

“You’re dying? Do you mean regeneration, or…” Jack trailed off, unwilling to give that terrible thought the reality of words.

"I don't know. There was a prophecy: 'your song is ending. It is returning through the dark. He will knock four times.' "

Jack paled. "The knocking…does that mean…but he _died_."

"That hasn't stopped him in the past. I can't be certain, but I believe the prophecy about the knocks refers to him. The first part, though, is far too clear. You know I've always been a runner, Jack, but since I heard that prophecy I've been moving faster than ever. More recklessly, too. If I know what's going to kill me, then I can do anything until then."

Jack tried to imagine the Doctor more restless and reckless than usual. It was not a comforting thought.

"That's part of why I overreached at Bowie Base. A human had to untie the knots I'd made in the timeline. Her name was Adelaide Brooke. It was a shock, realizing that I'd become so out of control. I wondered…" The Doctor paused, swallowing visibly. "For a moment, I wondered if it would be for the best to let the prophecy take its course, hoping the new me turned out a little wiser."

"I'm glad it hasn't happened yet," Jack said. He knew regeneration didn't change who the Doctor was fundamentally, but it would hurt to lose the pinstriped Doctor with whom he'd survived the Valiant, especially so soon after losing his first Doctor all over again.

"Yeah. Me too." The Doctor glanced up from his intense study of the ground, giving Jack a quick look of gratitude. "Anyway, I couldn't think like that for long. After all, my next self could be better, but he could be worse, couldn't he? The more I thought about it, the more I thought I'd been right after all. What Adelaide did was very brave, but that didn't make her right. After all, she was _only_ a human. What could she possibly know that a Time Lord didn't? I thought I could have overruled the laws of time if she'd let me." The way the Doctor spit out the words let Jack know full well that he was repeating past thoughts he was now ashamed of.

Jack shifted uncomfortably. He knew too well that the Doctor wasn’t infallible in his decisions. Still, the Doctor's mistakes were mostly along the lines of disregarding the emotion and agency of a human companion. It was difficult to conceive of him screwing with the laws of time itself, endangering the entire universe. Even when the decision was horrible, like ending the Time War, Jack had assumed he could count on the Doctor to choose what was best for the greater good. Jack felt shaken almost as badly as when he'd awakened to a satellite full of bodies and no sign of the Doctor and Rose.

"What did you do?" Jack asked.

"I decided to prove that I hadn’t harmed the future of the human race by checking on Adelaide's granddaughter, Susie Fontana Brooke, on the Proxima Centauri expedition. She was supposed to lose her left hand in a coolant explosion on the way back, but I fixed the leak while I was there and prevented the accident. No fixed point there, but changing the timeline still has consequences. Susie could pilot more interstellar expeditions with two hands, which sped up humanity's spread to the stars. Brilliant result, except it would put humans in conflict with the Tratvorm Empire at its height. That would have been bad news for everyone, so I started Tratvorm's Beige Revolution a few years early. It cost more lives than the original version, but not that many, and they were all little insignificant people. Time as a whole was looking better and better." There were shadows in the Doctor's voice, dark as the space between the stars.

"Little, insignificant people," Jack repeated. That statement was so unlike the Doctor he knew that it sent chills through his veins.

"I know." The Doctor grimaced.

"Damn," Jack muttered. He knew the Doctor wouldn't be in confessional mode at all unless things had gone pear-shaped, but if the Doctor had really thought like that, he'd been farther gone than Jack had believed possible.

"Yeah." The Doctor sighed miserably before continuing his story. "I went on like that for a while, same old TARDIS life, just a little bit bolder, a little off-kilter. Then I got back from ten days holiday on New Tahiti…"

"You took a ten day holiday?" Jack interrupted. The Doctor rarely went more than 36 hours without stirring up trouble.

"Welll, two days of holiday, six days in jail, and two more bringing down the government," the Doctor clarified. "Lovely planet, New Tahiti. If you order a mixed drink at the beach bars, instead of a mini umbrella it comes with a tiny robot mermaid in the glass. At least that's how it was before I went through. Not sure about now. Anyway, when I got back to the TARDIS, I found that my phone had dozens of messages from Martha, Mickey, Sarah Jane, UNIT...just about everyone who knew I had a phone and everyone they could recruit."

"The 456. You weren't refusing to help, you just didn't get the message in time," Jack realized, something relaxing in him as he understood the mystery of the Doctor's absence Earth's time of need.

"Not quite," the Doctor countered, causing Jack's heart to sink again. "It would have involved crossing some causality streams, but I could have set up a Shorelli stabilization field and managed to arrive before the messages. The problem is that the visit of the species you call the 456 is another fixed point, like Bowie Base. I'd never known the details, but I knew the invasion's aftermath brought down several governments and touched the lives of nearly every human on the planet. Interfering with that would be recklessness of the highest order. I was about to do it anyway. I planned to be more careful than at Bowie Base, but what sort of _lord_ doesn't get to remake the laws to suit him? What's the use of all this power if I can’t fix tragedies like that?" There was a note of pleading in the Doctor's voice.

"You're a Time Lord, not a Time Emperor or Time Pope. For better or worse, your authority has limits, and you're not infallible. That doesn't make you useless," Jack said.

"Time Lord is a rather rough translation of the Gallifreyan, which is…" the Doctor began to argue. Jack interrupted him.

"My point stands."

The Doctor looked dubious, but he went on with his story instead of arguing further.

"The last message on my phone was from your Gwen, two days after the 456 were defeated. She didn't ask me where I'd been. She just wanted me to find you. She told me about Ianto, and about what you had to do. Kill Steven to save the world." The Doctor's voice was soft and careful, like he was soothing a dangerous animal.

The mention brought a terrible pang to Jack's heart, but nothing so unbearable as to derail him from the Doctor's story. If anything, the Doctor's revelation that the invasion of the 456 was a fixed point lightened his crushing burden of guilt just a little bit. Jack had done what he had to do, lost what he had to lose. The entire time-space continuum pivoted around those dark days unfolding just _so_. The knowledge didn’t lessen the horror, but it made sense of it somewhat. He nodded to show the Doctor that he was coping.

"What Gwen told me opened up a locked door in my brain. I remembered Parnialus Station and meeting you just after the Time War. I finally understood what you're running from, Jack, and I am so, so sorry." The compassion in the Doctor's face threatened to shatter Jack, but he reminded himself to focus on the man in front of him, not his past.

"Then you came here?" Jack asked. That didn't sound like the full story yet.

"Not quite. My first impulse was to work even harder to change the fixed point, timelines be damned. I wanted to spare you. Then I remembered what you said before I left you here. 'I couldn’t risk the integrity of time, no matter what I lost. It’s something I learned from you.' That's when I stepped back and realized what I was doing, realized how close I was to doing something very, very dangerous, and not the good sort of dangerous.

"I've been on my own too long. Makes my mind like an echo chamber, too loud and not enough sense. I need someone else to tell me when I'm being an idiot. I thought about trying to find a new companion, but I couldn't take a chance of picking someone who might not stand up to me. Most of my former companions have made good lives for themselves, and I'd just disrupt them."

"Whereas I've made a complete mess of my life," Jack said with a sigh. Of course the Doctor came to the freak immortal who killed his kin only after eliminating all other possible choices.

"We _are_ two of a kind," the Doctor said with a rueful smile. "It helps that you're hard to break. With the prophecy, anyone traveling with me is even more at risk than usual. Most of all, I needed someone who sees me clearly, faults and all. I need you, Jack. I remembered what you said about wanting time to get back on your feet, but you have a working vortex manipulator now. Finding a person who could be anywhere in time and space is tricky, even someone as distinctive as you. This was the only place I could be sure to find you. I came up with a _brilliant_ plan that would convince you to come with me right away and do us both a world of good in the process."

“You’re an idiot if you thought it was a better idea to seduce me than to tell me the truth,” Jack said.

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Me being an idiot.” The Doctor ran his hands through his hair nervously.

Jack unconsciously echoed the gesture, his mind a confusion of conflicting emotions. The Doctor had long been Jack’s pole star, the beacon he steered himself by, and finding that beacon off course left Jack disoriented and uneasy. It was like learning the world was flat.

It shook Jack that the Doctor now seemed to look to _him_ as a beacon. Surely his hands were stained with too much blood and weakened by too much failure to ever hold up someone as strong as the Doctor. He’d do it, though. Somehow. The Doctor needed him, and nothing in this situation changed the fact that Jack would always come when the Doctor called. This was still the Doctor, after all. Even when the Doctor finally broke and went way too far, he did so not by taking revenge or seeking power but by trying to save lives.

“No fool like an old fool, Doc, and you and I are two of the oldest fools around,” Jack said, deliberately echoing his words to the Doctor’s previous incarnation a day or a lifetime ago. “Your latest example of foolishness is thinking for even one second that I wouldn’t come after what you just told me.”

The Doctor’s shoulders hunched up even further. “You don’t have to come, Jack. You don’t owe me a thing. Make your own decision and don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.”

“Doctor, listen. Ignoring how passive-aggressive and manipulative that last statement was, I _am_ making my own decision. I’m coming with you. It’s not because I owe you anything in some way that can be tallied up and someday called even. I’m coming because you need me. I’m not going to just ignore that. That’s the sort of man you made me.” Jack tried to put all of his trust and admiration for the Doctor into his tone.

“Really? I wouldn’t say that either of us has the best track record about abandoning friends. You and I, Jack, we’re runners,” the Doctor said ruefully. Jack winced. That hit a little too close to home. Gwen might have had Rhys for emotional support, but did that really make it okay that he'd left her to rebuild Torchwood without him? Still, now wasn’t the time to deal with that regret.

“Guess now’s as good a time as any for slowing down to pick up someone else. The running away from friends is the exception, not the rule. Remember, the first time I met you, you saved my life and took me in after I nearly destroyed humankind.”

“The first time _I_ met _you_ , you saved my life after I’d just taken the Destroyer of Worlds title far too literally.”

“I didn’t even know it was you when I pulled you out of the fire,” Jack began, but the Doctor interrupted him.

“Not just that. I made myself forget, but the experience of knowing you was still part of me, underneath. I don’t know what I’d have become without that.” The Doctor's eyes were full of shadows.

Jack didn’t know how to answer that, and his voice seemed to have flown off into space. After a moment, he managed, “Well. I’ll just radio one of the salvage ships that we’re leaving the shuttle. They can retrieve it and turn it in for our deposit. Then we can be off to the least fixed spot we can find.”

The Doctor’s serious stillness dissolved into his usual kinetic energy. “ _Molto bene!_ What’s your pleasure, Jack? A pulsar discotheque in 39th-century Andromeda, pteranodon migration in the Cretaceous, Galileo’s trial for heresy, the singing shrubbery of Sossossis Six—the universe is at our feet! We could even visit the wild west.”

“Will you wear a cowboy hat?” Jack asked.

“Wellllll.” The Doctor drew out the syllable interminably.

“Never mind. Singing shrubbery sounds fine.”

“You say that now only because you’ve never heard their rendition of ‘My Way.’ They didn’t always sing old Earth karaoke classics, but some genetic engineer got creative, and when the great storm of 6281 tore down the experimental greenhouse…” The Doctor shot off on one of his enthusiastic tangents. Jack half-listened as the Doctor followed him into the little spaceship, where Jack made arrangements for its pick-up. The Doctor kept on talking about everything and nothing until they crossed the savage ground one more time and entered the TARDIS.

Jack went to the console and ran his hand over it lightly. The engines purred.

“She doesn’t sound afraid of my wrongness anymore,” Jack remarked.

“No. Not since she was made into that monstrous paradox machine and you helped to fix her. She likes having you around now. I suppose there’s truth to the old Gallifreyan saying: like TARDIS, like Time Lord.”

“Is that actually an old Gallifreyan saying, or just something the old Gallifreyan in front of me says?”

“It really is, believe it or not, though the version in the original language is rather longer and more obtuse.”

“It’s a good saying. You’re both _very_ pretty,” Jack said, petting the console.

“Stop molesting the ship, Jack,” the Doctor scolded, but he didn’t sound terribly annoyed. He looked down at the console and adjusted some dials, then half-glanced back at Jack with a little too much casualness to be quite believable. “For me, on the other hand…my offer stands, you know. If you want it.”

It took Jack a minute to process what the Doctor meant. He swallowed hard. “I think you've known what I want for a very long time. The real question is: how do _you_ feel about it, Doctor?”

The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, his brow wrinkled. “Jack, I, well…” he began uncomfortably.

“I’m not asking for declarations of love or anything like that. I don’t need promises. I just need to know: do you really mean this? Is this something you want for yourself? Or are you just throwing me a bone, so to speak?” It was so hard to make himself ask. He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer, but it would be far worse to give himself even more completely to the Doctor without at least some reciprocation. Better to save them both problems down the line.

"Jack," the Doctor said, his voice soft and a little sad, "you must be even more off your game than I'd realized if you of all people can't tell when you're being honestly propositioned. Come here. Please."

The Doctor stretched out a hand. Jack's breath caught in his throat. The Doctor's face was unusually open, and Jack could see the loneliness and, yes, the _want_ in his expression. It was enough and then some. Jack closed the small distance between them. The Doctor leaned in to meet him.

The kiss was utterly unlike the fierce kiss the Doctor had greeted Jack with on the planet’s surface. This time the Doctor was tentative, keeping his mouth shut at first. When Jack slid his tongue along the Doctor’s lips to deepen the kiss, the Doctor opened up to him, but the pace stayed slow, full of promises rather than demands. Jack thought he could happily continue this kiss forever.

Faint vibrations from the TARDIS engines traveled up from the soles of his feet, and his nostrils were full of the Doctor’s scent. Jack relaxed for the first time in at least two years. He was still grieving, still burdened with guilt, still worried about the Doctor, still unsure he deserved the trust the Doctor was putting in him. He had seen too much horror to believe that the world could ever be made fully right. And yet, for the moment, Jack Harkness was genuinely okay. Better than okay—he was home.

He realized he believed the younger Doctor’s pronouncement that his healing ability included his mind, given enough time; he would do all he could to make sure that the Doctor healed as well. There was still the question of what would come of the Doctor’s prophecy and Jack’s unfinished business on Earth, and there were no easy answers. Still, Jack could take comfort in the fact that he and the Doctor were stumbling through the uncertainty together.

Then the last Time Lord and the immortal Captain went to bed together, and no one disturbed them for the whole night. It was a start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _There's the wind, and the rain,  
>  and the many stars that guide us,  
> we have some of them inside us._  
> -Dar Williams, "Mercy of the Fallen"


End file.
